Biography:

Shivadarshini Ramachandran is a recent First Class Honours graduate in Biomedical Science from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at Northumbria University. Her academic interests are on clinical diagnostics, infectious diseases and translational applications of next-generation sequencing. Her research evaluated the analytical sensitivity of a host-depleted metagenomic workflow (PaRTI-Seq™) using Mycobacterium smegmatis as a structurally resilient model organism. Through this work, she developed expertise in microbial culture, DNA extraction optimisation and Illumina-based sequencing analysis, with a focus on improving pathogen detection in bloodstream infections and advancing rapid, culture-independent diagnostic approaches.