Our Team
At the Sivaramakrishnan lab, we care about every individual’s voice. We embrace diversity and community and welcome anyone with a love for science and worms!
Priya Sivaramakrishnan, Ph.D
Assistant Professor
Priya grew up in the South of India and came to the United States to do her graduate work in the Christophe Herman Lab at Baylor College of Medicine. During her PhD., she studied how bacterial RNA polymerase is regulated to prevent conflicts with other DNA-centric processes, replication and DNA repair.
She then moved to the University of Pennsylvania to train as a postdoc with John Murray, beginning her journey towards understanding how transcription dynamics are regulated during embryonic cell fate specification, using the nematode worm, C. elegans as a model.
As a postdoc, she have served as a leader for the Genetics Gender Equity Group and the co-president of the Penn Postdoctoral Association (PPA). She believes there is immense value in students and postdocs finding their communities in their research institutions and continues to support the living and training experience for all.
Gabriela Vida, Ph.D
Postdoctoral Fellow
Gabby is originally from New York where she got her B.S. in Biology at Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2018. In the fall of 2018, she started her PhD. work at the University of Pennsylvania where she joined Steve DiNardo’s lab studying stem cell niche dynamics in the Drosophila testis. After graduating, she joined our lab in 2024 as Postdoc where she is interested in understanding how transcription elongation dynamics are required for specifying cells with their proper cell fate.
Contact: gvida@chop.edu
Gabby’s work studying the fly testes niche cytoskeletal structure and it’s importance for germ cell function is featured by Development!
Read more here.
Akhila Guttikonda
Undergraduate Student, Neuroscience and Nutrition Science
Akhila is an undergraduate student at Penn studying Neuroscience and Nutrition Science. She is originally from the suburbs of Atlanta, GA. She is interested in studying rare neurodevelopmental disorders and decision making at the cellular level.
Akhila is currently working on generating and studying worm models of SRSF1-related syndromic developmental disorders.
Brenna Tento
Research Technician
Brenna is originally from the suburbs of Philadelphia and received her B.S in biology from the University of Delaware. In her free time, she enjoys hanging out with her dog and riding horses. She is responsible for lab maintenance and is currently studying the regulation of muscle fates in the developing embryo.
Contact: tentob@chop.edu
Agustin Velasco
Research Technician
Agustin is originally from North Jersey and earned his BA in Biology from Rutgers University, where he had the privilege of conducting undergraduate research under the direction of Dr. Barth D. Grant. There, he leveraged the C. elegans intestinal model to contribute to the lab’s investigation of endocytic trafficking, specifically elucidating the molecular players and mechanisms involved in endosomal tubule formation and fission within the context of endocytic recycling in vivo. After graduating, he joined the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as a research technician, where he is working on establishing C. elegans as a model for VUS classification in the context of rare disorders. His work focuses on developing CRISPR-based strategies to evaluate the functional impact of patient-derived variants implicated in mitochondrial and developmental diseases. By leveraging C. elegans for gene humanization and endogenous variant modeling, his research aims to advance functional validation pipelines that integrate with clinical workflows to support timely and evidence-based variant interpretation.
Contact: velascoa@chop.edu