Cell scientist to watch – Girish Ram Mali

ABSTRACT Girish Ram Mali is a group leader at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, UK. He completed his doctoral work with Prof. Pleasantine Mill at the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the University of Edinburgh (UK), studying human ciliopathies and ciliary dynein assembly. He subsequently moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK), where, under the supervision of Dr Andrew Carter, he studied the assembly and regulation of ciliary dynein. Girish established his independent research group in 2022 at the School of Biochemistry, University of Bristol, UK, and in 2023 he moved to the Dunn School of Pathology. His lab seeks to understand motile cilia and what makes them move with a focus on axonemal dynein assembly factors (DNAAFs), which shepherd the folding and assembly of individual dynein subunits into functional macromolecular motors that power ciliary motion. We spoke with Girish over Zoom to learn more about his career path, scientific mentorship, and how science is a human endeavour.