Dr. Shantanu Chowdhury

Dr. Shantanu Chowdhury

CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi

Shantanu Chowdhury is currently a professor at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi. His research interests include understanding mechanisms behind telomerase control and telomere function in cancer and neurological disorders, including neural differentiation and tumor organoid biology. Methods applied include genomics, large scale computational analysis and CRISPR-editing techniques. Fundamental work from his group on how non-duplex DNA structures impact our understanding of biological mechanisms are widely used.

Shantanu received his MSc in organic chemistry from Jadavpur University, Kolkata and PhD in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad. He trained as a molecular biologist in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Nebraska, USA and at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany. In 2002 he moved to his current position where he started his own laboratory. In 2012, Shantanu was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Biological Sciences for work done in India. He is Fellow of the Indian Academies (Bangalore and Allahabad); Senior Fellow of the DBT / Wellcome Trust India Alliance and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry a well-known publication from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.