Khushboo Borah

India

Plant Sciences (DPhil), 2016
Keble College, Oxford

Funding: Louis Dreyfus

Khushboo completed her DPhil in Plant Sciences in July 2018. She came to the UK after completing her engineering and graduating with a first class honours from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, India in 2013. She has also worked as a research assistant at the University of Cambridge in 2012 and at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India in 2011. For her academic excellence, she received the National Talent Search Examination Award, Nehru Award, the NSUI (National Students Union of India) Award, Anundoram Borooah award, and the Oil India Ltd Scholarship between 2006 and 2010.Following her studies in Oxford, Khushboo is currently working as a Research Fellow in the University of Surrey and collaborating with scientists in India. She is applying her research expertise in Tuberculosis (TB), one of the deadliest infectious diseases that kills a million people every year. She believes that the scientific development in developing new treatments is urgently required to combat TB, which is one of the leading infectious killers in her country of origin India.

Khushboo has secured a number of grants including the UK-India Newton-Bhabha Scholarship award in 2019 and VALIDATE network funding in 2018 and 2020 to conduct TB research. She has been successful in identifying vulnerable drug targets in TB and her research has been published in high ranking journals. Khushboo believes that the research skills gained at Oxford has allowed her to make significant contributions in infectious diseases research and will continue to boost her future research.