Ravi Dalal

http://www.stanford.edu/~rvdalal

B.S. 1997 MIT Electrical Engineering
B.S. 1998 MIT Physics
M.Eng. 1998 MIT Electrical Engineering

I am a graduate student in the physics department. In the Block lab, I am studying molecular motor enzymes that interact with nucleic acids. I am currently working on lambda exonuclease, a 5'->3' processive motor which degrades the 5' strand of DNA, leaving only a single stranded piece of DNA, which the lambda bacteriophage uses for recombination. We are interested in lambda exonuclease because it is a relatively simple and elegant ATP-independent motor which gets its energy from the hydrolysis of DNA.

Before joining the Block lab, I worked at MIT in the semiconductor laser group for Rajeev Ram; for my masters thesis I studied analog modulation of a distributed feedback laser for fiber optic communications. I spent one year working as a software tester at the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for the Chandra X-Ray satellite, which was launched on Space Shuttle Columbia in July 1999.