Raghavendra (Raj) Ramachanderan is a PhD student in Prof Randall Platt’s group at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) at ETH Zurich. He has a BSc in chemistry from the University of Regensburg and an MSc in molecular biotechnology with a major in bioinformatics from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, both in Germany. His interests lie in the intersection of synthetic biology and microbial systems biology. As a doctoral candidate in the Platt group, his research focuses on the application and expansion of Record-seq technology in gut bacteria both experimentally and computationally in order to monitor the gastrointestinal tract and to glean insights into pathogenesis and disease development.