Rama Akondy is an Associate professor of Biology in the Trivedi school of Biosciences. She received her PhD from the National Institute of Immunology (New Delhi, India) and worked at Emory university (Atlanta, USA) first as a post-doctoral researcher and then as junior faculty. Immunological memory, the ability of the immune system to ‘remember’ a previous encounter with a pathogen and respond to it better upon re-encounter, forms the basis of vaccination. Rama’s primary area of interest is understanding immunological memory in humans by observing how our immune system reacts to viruses, vaccines and tumors. Her proudest moment was when she opened a textbook (Plotkin’s Vaccines) and found a figure from her paper.