ABOVE: © CORWIN VON KUHWEDE
Born and raised in Kenya, Avnika Ruparelia moved to Australia with the hope of becoming a doctor. When her application to medical school was denied, she switched her focus to biomedical science. As someone who hates the sight of blood, the career diversion suited her. Ruparelia, now a research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, revels in “the feeling of being the only person who knows that one thing,” she says. “It’s absolutely fantastic.”
Ruparelia got her start in research as an undergraduate in the lab of Monash muscle biologist Robert Bryson-Richardson. In 2009, she worked with him to map a gene that eventually was linked to myofibrillar myopathies (MFM), a group of diseases resulting in progressive muscle weakness that is characterized by protein clumping and structural failure within muscle cells. As Bryson-Richardson and Ruparelia began studying MFM, they and colleagues developed a zebrafish mutant ...
