Preeti Moar, PhD

Preeti graduated from Banasthali University, India with a BS in Biotechnology and went on to pursue MS in Biotechnology at Kumaun University, India. She studied the effects of Psychrotrophic Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR) on Antioxidant and Antibacterial activities of Dianthus, from the lower Himalayan region, for her post-graduation thesis. Preeti joined the PhD program at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India and explored molecular interventions to fight the HIV reservoir. She has experience in working with infectious clinical samples in BSL-2+ facilities and has expertise in molecular biology techniques and immunoassays. She also assisted in teaching experimental immunology courses at the University. After her PhD, Preeti joined a postdoc position at Department of Molecular Biology at Umeå University in Sweden, where she studied the innate immune response and inflammation-driven pathology in Yersinia infections. Preeti has now joined the Ndhlovu lab at Weill Cornell Medicine with her research focus on HIV pathogenesis and cure.

Research Interest: Infectious disease biology, HIV pathogenesis, Innate immunity, Inflammation

Awards/Accolades:

Senior Research Fellowship by University Grants Commission, New Delhi, India (2017 – 2020)
Global Health Travel Award by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to present work at Keystone Symposium on Functional Cures and the Eradication of HIV in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada (2019)
Junior Research Fellowship by University Grants Commission, New Delhi, India (2015 – 2017)
Student Scholarship by Department of Biotechnology, Government of India (2013 – 2015)

Fun Fact: Preeti likes to explore new places and knows several different languages including Hindi, Haryanvi, English, Swedish, Bengali, Punjabi, and traces of Urdu and French. Preeti trained as a pilot before she got into academics and holds a student pilot license to fly single-engine aeroplanes.

Hometown: New Delhi, India

BS, Biotechnology – Banasthali University, India (2013)

MS, Biotechnology – Kumaun University, India (2015)

PhD, Immunology – Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (2021)

Publications

Moar, P., & Tandon, R. (2021). Galectin-9 as a biomarker of disease severity. Cellular immunology, 361, 104287.

Moar, P., Sushmita, K., Kateriya, S., & Tandon, R. (2020). Transcriptional profiling indicates cAMP-driven reversal of HIV latency in monocytes occurs via transcription factor SP-1. Virology, 542, 40-53.

Natarajan, V., Moar, P., Kaur, U. S., Venkatesh, V., Kumar, A., Chaturvedi, R., ... & Tandon, R. (2019). Helicobacter pylori Reactivates Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 in Latently Infected Monocytes with Increased Expression of IL-1β and CXCL8. Current Genomics, 20(8), 556.

Moar, P., Shet, A., Kaur, U. S., Gopalan, B. P., Himanshu, D., Kateriya, S., & Tandon, R. (2019, November). Increased level of plasma Galectin-9 is associated with microbial translocation in perinatally HIV-infected children. In HIV MEDICINE (Vol. 20, pp. 233-233).

Kaur, U. S., Shet, A., Rajnala, N., Gopalan, B. P., Moar, P., Singh, B. P., ... & Tandon, R. (2018). High Abundance of genus Prevotella in the gut of perinatally HIV-infected children is associated with IP-10 levels despite therapy. Scientific reports, 8(1), 17679.

Tanwar, M., Sharma, K., Moar, P., & Kateriya, S. (2018). Biochemical characterization of the engineered soluble photoactivated guanylate cyclases from microbes expands optogenetic tools. Applied biochemistry and biotechnology, 185, 1014-1028.