As a Zoology major, Lavanya Rajagopalan gained experience in dissection of vertebrate animals, and in analysis of blood and other biological samples. In her master's education at UTMB, she has gained experience in biochemical/biophysical techniques to study protein structure-funtion relationships, which will facilitate the proposed biophysical studies. Her first-author publication deals with structure-function relatiionships in the CXCR1 N-domain. She has presented her research on chemokine-receptor interactions in poster and oral format at several meetings. Research Project: Regulation of IL8-receptor affinity and specificity