Biosciences | Life: Origin & Synthesis

Alok Bhattacharya

Professor

Alok Bhattacharya is a Professor of Biology. He is the recipient of Robert McNamara Fellowship (World Bank), Rockefeller Biotechnology Career Development Award, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize and JC Bose Fellowship, and is a fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian Academy of Sciences. He also served as one of the Vice Presidents of INSA. Following his Ph.D. at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, he trained at the National Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, USA. He spent a large part of his independent career at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where his scientific interests were in the area of infectious diseases, biology of parasitic pathogens and genomics. He is credited with helping to set up one of the first teaching and research programs on Bioinformatics and Computation Biology in India. His current research interests are rare diseases, computational genomics and biology of pathogenic parasites.

Sandeep Ameta

Assistant Professor

Sandeep Ameta is an experimentalist interested in building evolvable synthetic systems using interdisciplinary approaches. Despite immense efforts, how to build a synthetic chemical system that can evolve and what constitutes it remains an open question. Similarly, the series of steps that led to the emergence of self-sustaining living systems on the early Earth are still elusive. To address some of these questions, he is developing synthetic chemical systems capable of undergoing evolution and demonstrating ‘life-like’ features. His work revolves around self-replicating chemical systems, phase-separated droplets, droplet-based microfluidics, single-cell/droplet sequencing, and other biophysical methods. Before joining Ashoka, Sandeep was an independent Campus fellow at Simons Centre for the Study of Living Machines at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at ESPCI Paris (École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la Ville de Paris), France and PhD from Heidelberg University, Germany. He did his Master’s in Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) and Bachelor’s in Biotechnology from the University of Rajasthan.