Dr. Lakshmi Ramachandra became the TB Section Chief in DMID at NIAID in March 2019, and currently oversees the TB program for the Division. Dr. Ramachandra earned her PhD at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India and then joined the lab of Dr. Alexander Rudensky at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute/University of Washington, to work in the field of immunology. She then joined Dr. Clifford Harding at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) where she began studying how Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) subverts the immune response. Dr. Ramachandra continued her career at CWRU, and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology, conducted basic and translational research on the immune responses to Mtb and influenza. Dr. Ramachandra came to the NIH in 2010 as a Scientific Review Officer at NIAID. She subsequently moved to the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation (DAIT) as a Program Officer and served as the programmatic point of contact for TB research at DAIT. Dr. Ramachandra grew up in Ghana, West Africa.