Group remembers slain LSU graduate students

• By SONIA SMITH
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Mar 29, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Almost four months after two graduate students were slain in an on-campus apartment, some 100 members of the LSU community gathered Friday to commemorate the lives and work of the students.

The Dec. 13 slayings of Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma, 31, and Kiran Kumar Allam, 33, remain unsolved.

At Friday’s ceremony, their professors ran through slide shows of the two men’s research, a substitute for the thesis defense they will never hold.

Allam, a biochemistry student, was interested in developing new drugs to treat brain tumors, his advisor, Graca Vicente, said. Allam had designed a molecule that could potentially penetrate the blood-brain barrier to destroy tumor cells, Vicente said.

When Allam was killed, he was testing the molecule on human tumor cells and planned to move on to trials in lab mice, Vicente said.

Komma, a biology student, was studying the structure of a protein thought to have tumor-suppressing properties, his advisor, Wayne Zhou, said.

“He had really progressed to an outstanding biochemist,” Zhou said.

Marcia Newcomer, chair of LSU’s department of biological sciences, presented a plaque bearing portraits of Allam and Komma that will hang in one of the science buildings on campus.

Chemistry department chair Andy Maverick announced that the chemistry and biology departments had dedicated a live oak outside the Life Sciences Annex building to Komma and Allam.

“We’ve lost the people,” Maverick said. “We still know the things they have discovered, but we’ve lost the people who were growing.”

Friends remembered Komma as an accomplished teacher who took pride in engaging the students in his biology for non-science majors lab.

Matthew Gilbert, a biology graduate student, said he would meet daily for coffee with Komma and remembered his friend as an accepting man who was never petty.

After Komma’s death, Gilbert wanted to reach out to Komma’s family and friends in India.