Gokul Swaminathan

Biography

At 29, Gokul Swaminathan is an up-and-coming scientist whose work is already driving important advances in the field of vaccines and infectious disease. “I was born and raised in India, and the impact that infectious diseases have is very personal to me,” he says. “I’ve experienced malaria and dengue fever first-hand and have lost family and friends at young ages, which led to my fascination with pathogens and how they can manipulate the human body.” At 19, while pursuing his under graduate engineering degree at SRM University, India, he was chosen to perform his thesis research work at the Georgetown University Medical Center as an international research scholar. From there, Gokul continued his training at Drexel University, where his research focused on understanding how HIV interacts with human immune cells. His research at Drexel earned him the Amadeo Bondi award for research excellence, one of the school’s most prestigious awards given to a graduate student, and sparked his interest in the translational side of research – how to turn his findings into medicines and vaccines. Armed with a Ph.D. from Drexel, Gokul joined Merck in 2014 as a postdoc research fellow. After his rotation, he accepted a full-time position as a senior scientist in our infectious diseases and vaccines research group at our West Point laboratories. Fast forward a few months, and he’s now a founding employee at Merck’s new Exploratory Science Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he and some of his colleagues are initially focusing on understanding how the human body interacts with pathogens in order to help develop better and safer vaccines and therapies against infectious diseases. When asked how he found the move, he jokingly notes that Cambridge is “a bit colder than I’m used to” while being “full of so many over-achievers, it’s almost annoying. But every conversation I have here is scientifically and professionally enriching”.

Research Interest

Scientist