Khushdeep Mangat, a biology doctorate student, has been awarded the Rennes Metropolis’s Inbound Mobility Support Scholarship, which will allow her to conduct research in France this summer. Mangat works in the laboratory of Nick Menhart, associate professor of biology. The award, aimed at enhancing international collaboration, is sponsored by the French government and supports foreign doctorate students in their travel to and work in a French laboratory.

Mangat’s research at IIT centers on the structure and interactions of dystrophin, the protein defective in various forms of muscular dystrophy, a fatal and unfortunately common genetic disease afflicting one in every 3500 boys. In France, Mangat will be joining the laboratory of Elisabeth LeRumeur, a longstanding collaborator of Menhart, at the Université de Rennes, and studying the interactions between certain regions of dystrophin and neuronal NO synthetase, an enzyme responsible for regulation of blood flow to muscles during exercise.