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Guy Burwell's Thermofisher painting of auditory receptor cell sensing information to brain

Grad student's research selected for Thermo Fisher's promotional posters

A close look at Guy Burwell's illustration depicting Paroma Chatterjee's research

Congratulations to Paroma Chatterjee, a biochemistry and biophysics graduate student, whose thesis research project was selected recently for Thermo Fisher Scientific’s promotional posters on Molecular Probes brand reagents.

The poster will be part of a traveling airport display and will certainly make a global impact. The image is based on Paroma’s research on hearing and deafness using zebrafish as a model organism.

Guy Burwell's Thermofisher painting of auditory receptor cell sensing information to brain

Credit: Portland illustrator Guy Burwell depicts the structure of an auditory receptor cell that senses sound and transduces the information to the brain.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is the world leader in serving science, helping their customers accelerate life sciences research, solve complex analytical challenges, improve patient diagnostics and increase laboratory productivity.

Paroma is a Ph.D. candidate in OSU's Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate program. Her current research focuses on using the larval zebrafish as an in vivo model system to study otoferlin, a protein expressed in the sensory hair cells and essential for hearing.

She is a Graduate Research Assistant in the labs of Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Colin Johnson and Distinguished Professor of Molecular Toxicology Robyn Tanguay. She published a study (2015) in the journal of Molecular and Cellular Biology with both Johnson and Tanguay entitled, "Otoferlin Deficiency In Zebrafish Results In Defects in Balance and Hearing: Rescue of the Balance and Hearing Phenotype with Full-length and Truncated Forms of Mouse Otoferlin."

Paroma received her M.Sc. from University College of Science and Technology in Calcutta, India.