ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2025
The Emerging Generation Awards (E-Gen Awards) recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
About the awardee
Sesh A. Sundararaman, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and attending physician in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His research is focused on host-parasite interactions in malaria infection and developing novel antimalarial therapies. His clinical interests focus on the care of children with malaria and other travel-related infections.
Dr. Sundararaman completed his MD/PhD training at the Perelman School of Medicine, under the mentorship of Dr. Beatrice Hahn. During his PhD, he performed comparative genomic analyses of human and great ape malaria parasites, identifying key similarities and differences that likely influence the host specificity of these pathogens. This work culminated in fourteen publications, including first-author manuscripts in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, and Bioinformatics. During his fellowship, Dr. Sundararaman joined the laboratory of Dr. Audrey John at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His research, supported by the PIDS-St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Fellowship Award in Basic and Translational Science, identified and characterized prodrug-activating enzymes in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. He found that an erythrocyte enzyme, APEH, which is imported by and remains active within the parasite, is the activating enzyme for multiple potent antimalarial prodrugs. Dr. Sundararaman’s long-term goal is to establish an independent research program that combines host and pathogen genomics and molecular biology to understand how malaria parasites rely on their host cells during infection. In doing so, he hopes to identify new therapeutic targets to help combat this globally important pathogen.