Raman Vatsan

Raman Vatsan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering. His research integrates systems and synthetic biology with computational and experimental approaches to engineer biological systems at protein and genome scales.

Research Interests

• Understanding and designing allosteric proteins using deep mutational scanning and machine learning to uncover sequence-structure-function relationships.
• Engineering synthetic bacteriophages for host range regulation, antibacterial therapies, and precision microbiome editing.
• Developing high-throughput functional assays to predict impacts of genetic variants in disease-relevant genes.
• Designing novel transporters, gene delivery systems, and vaccine scaffolds with customized functionalities.

Tools & Techniques: Computational protein design (Rosetta), deep mutational scanning, chip-based DNA synthesis, metagenomic screening, single-cell RNA sequencing, and pooled barcoding assays.

Laboratory Focus: The Raman Lab emphasizes experimental screens enabling massive mutational perturbations in biological systems, revealing functional landscapes and training predictive models for biotechnological applications.