Dr. R.A. (Rajagopal) Murugan

I am B cell immunologist, studying antibody response against infectious diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis and COVID-19. Currently I am leading a team that works on characterizing the B cell response at the level of single cell based on transcriptome, antibody repertoire and generating monoclonal antibodies.
With the interest in studying host-pathogen interactions, I performed doctoral work in the lab of Prof. Hedda Wardemann at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin and German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg. This work unveiled the role of germline antibody binding to complex malaria antigen and how this could be used to design next generation immunogens to induce protective immune response.
I trained several bachelor and master students for their thesis and conducted theoretical and practical courses for university students.

- Open Competition Domain Science – XS (2023-2024) by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to identify novel antigens inducing protective
T cell response to malaria disease.
- Leiden University Fund/Gratama-Stichting/LUF to discover protective malaria antibodies and their target antigens.
- Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral fellowship by European Commission to study transcriptional and functional diversity in memory B cell response to human malaria.
- Werner Muller Award by German Society of Immunology (DGfI) for the achievements in the field of immunology that can be of benefit for the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of diseases of countries of the developing world.
- PhD fellowship by ZIBI graduate school at International Max Planck Research School and Graduiertenkolleg 1121.
- Master’s degree fellowship by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India upon getting top scores at the national level entrance exam.