Congratulations to Aravind Natarajan who defended his PhD thesis on July 23, 2019! His thesis focused on understanding and engineering protein glycosylation pathways in gram-negative bacteria. One of the most notable parts of his thesis research was the bottom-up engineering of an orthogonal O-linked protein glycosylation pathway in Escherichia coli for producing customized glycopeptides and glycoproteins including the Tn-MUC1 epitope that is associated with several different human cancers. During his time at Cornell, Aravind was very active inside and outside the laboratory, as exemplified by his co-creation of the Science Blender podcast that tells the personal side of the scientists and engineers in our department. Aravind is now a postdoctoral research associate in the Bhatt Laboratory at Stanford University, after which he hopes to become a professor of microbiology.