Shantanu Chowdhury (born 1968) is an Indian structural biologist and a professor at

Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) is a scientific research institute devoted primarily to biological research. It is a part of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India. The institute was founded ...

of the

Council of Scientific and Industrial Research The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research ( IAST: ''vaigyanik tathā audyogik anusandhāna pariṣada''), abbreviated as CSIR, was established by the Government of India in September 1942 as an autonomous body that has emerged as the ...

. He is known for developing a mechanism for ''gene regulation mediated by DNA Secondary-Structure in diverse cellular contexts''. An elected fellow of the

National Academy of Sciences, India The National Academy of Sciences, India, established in 1930, is the oldest science academy in India. It is located in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. Prof. Meghnad Saha was the founder president. Fellows *Suddhasatwa Basu * Sudha Bhattacharya * Ch ...

, he is a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the

Department of Biotechnology The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is an Indian government department, under the Ministry of Science and Technology responsible for administrating development and commercialisation in the field of modern biology and biotechnology in India. It ...

in 2010. The

, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (SSB) is a science award in India given annually by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for notable and outstanding research, applied or fundamental, in biology, ...

, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2012, for his contributions to biological sciences.

Biography

Shantanu Chowdhury, born on 9 September 1968 in the Indian state of

West Bengal West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fou ...

, completed his master's degree in chemistry at

Jadavpur University Jadavpur University is a public state university located in Jadavpur, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It was established in 1905 as ''Bengal Technical Institute'' and was converted into Jadavpur University in 1955. In 2022, it was ranked fourth am ...

, Kolkata before securing a PhD from the

Indian Institute of Chemical Technology The CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology is a national-level research center located in Hyderabad, Telangana, India under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). IICT conducts research in basic and applied chemistry, bio ...

, Hyderabad in 1998. His post-doctoral studies were at the department of biochemistry of

University of Nebraska A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...

and later at

Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology The Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology (german: Max-Planck-Institut für terrestrische Mikrobiologie, links=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max-Planck-Institut_f%C3%BCr_terrestrische_Mikrobiologie) is a research institute for terrestr ...

. He returned to India in 2001 and joined Insilico Sciences, Bangalore but his tenure there lasted only one year. His next move was to

(IGIB) as a scientist in 2002 where he serves as a professor of functional genomics. Chowdhury established his own laboratory at IGIB and his team is involved in researches in functional genomics. The group focuses its studies on the control of NME2, a metastasis suppressor, on

telomerase Telomerase, also called terminal transferase, is a ribonucleoprotein that adds a species-dependent telomere repeat sequence to the 3' end of telomeres. A telomere is a region of repetitive sequences at each end of the chromosomes of most euka ...

function and the biological action of DNA secondary structures like

G-quadruplex In molecular biology, G-quadruplex Nucleic acid secondary structure, secondary structures (G4) are formed in nucleic acids by sequences that are rich in guanine. They are helical in shape and contain guanine tetrads that can form from one, two o ...

. He and his colleagues are reported to have developed a new mechanism for gene regulation and elucidated the process of gene transcription involving G-quadruplex. His researches have been published in a number of articles and

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain t ...

, an online repository of scientific articles, has listed several of them. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of Bionivid, a Bengaluru-based information technology company involved in microarray

data analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

and sequencing. and has delivered keynote addresses which included the discourse on ''Engineering Reversal of Drug Resistance in Cancer Cells'' at the ''Drug Discovery India 2016'' conference held in Bengaluru in September 2016 and the address on ''The Emerging Story of DNA Quadruplexes in Genetic and Epigenetic Regulation'' at Asian Epigenomics 2016. He sits on the editorial boards of two science journals, Human Genomics and Journal of Biological Chemistry and has served as a peer-reviewer for JBC and PLOS Computational Biology.

Awards and honors

In 2007, Chowdhury received the Swarnajayanthi Fellowship of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and three years later, DBT honored him again with the 2010 National Bioscience Award for Career Development. The

Central Drug Research Institute The Central Drug Research Institute is a multidisciplinary research laboratory in Lucknow, India, employing scientific personnel from various areas of biomedical sciences. Prof. Tapas Kumar Kundu, a molecular biologist, academician and recipien ...

awarded him the Excellence in Drug Research Award for Life Sciences category in 2011 and he also received the

Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...

-DBT Fellowship the same year. He was awarded the

, one of the highest Indian science awards, by the

the next year. He was also elected as a fellow by the

in 2012.

Chemical & Engineering News ''Chemical & Engineering News'' (''C&EN'') is a weekly news magazine published by the American Chemical Society, providing professional and technical news and analysis in the fields of chemistry and chemical engineering.American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all ...

featured his researches twice, in 2007 and in 2009, citing their relevance as future drug targets.

Selected bibliography

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Notes

References

External links