Alumna of St Dominic High School Defends her PhD thesis at Radboud University

PHILIPSBURG — Ekta Foster-Lachmandas a graduate of St Dominic High School’s Class of 2008 successfully defended her PhD thesis on November 15, before the Faculty of Medical Sciences of Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen. The title of her dissertation was Host Response to Tuberculosis: Impact of Diabetes and Cellular Metabolism of Immune Cells.

Radboud University Medical Center Media Relations Office issued the following summary of Ekta’s thesis:

She “has examined host responses to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, integrating immunology and cellular metabolism, in the laboratory of the Experimental Internal Medicine of Radboudumc and the A-star institute in Singapore. Part of her work specifically focused on diabetes, a very important risk factor for tuberculosis, as part of the EU-funded TANDEM consortium which combines clinical-epidemiological and more basic research in Peru, South Africa, Romania and Indonesia to tackle the problem of combined TB [tuberculosis] and diabetes (www.tandem-fp7.eu)”.

After graduating from St. Dominic High School, Ekta began her tertiary education at HAN University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen majoring in Life Sciences. As part of her studies, she completed an internship at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. While there she began her research and was invited to continue in the Netherlands at Radboud Universiteit.

Ekta Foster-Lachmandas is recently married and currently resides in Zurich, Switzerland.