My Story So far.....

"Earlier in my childhood, during my high school time, I became so much fond of biological sciences that I decided to explore this field further. At the same time, I was also fascinated by computers and decided to work in an area that would blend both my interests. After completing high school, I decided to gain a more in-depth perspective in biology and thus pursued a graduate course in Molecular Biology. 

 I pursued my graduation from West Bengal University of Technology, India (2006-2009). In my graduation, I took a number of courses, including Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Microbiology, Immunology, Genetics, Genetic Engineering, and Ecology. Besides this, I learned to work with various bioinformatics tools. I felt that the field of computational biology would be ideal to fulfill my childhood aspirations. I also undertook small projects using proteomic and genomic databases. 

To grasp the essence of Bioinformatics, I decided to do my masters in it in the year 2009 and applied to Banasthali University, one of the prestigious universities in India. Once I got registered for the course, I was introduced with so many new techniques, including a deep understanding of statistics and various programming languages(Perl, JAVA, C). I learned one-way, two-way ANOVA, chi-square test, student t-test, z-test of statistics in SPSS with a mathematical approach. During that course, I became familiar with Chemoinformatics and Phylogenetic analysis along with their tools. 

 Moreover, I did an external project from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, to complete my Master's thesis. This time my plan was in the area of genomics. In my project, I worked with R interface, Normalization & Pre-processing software. I learned data mining and used public databases such as GEO and Array Express. I performed microarray database designing and R programming to generate graphical output in the form of Heatmaps. After the successful completion of my dissertation and my postgraduate course, I decided to continue with the same project to further enhance my skills in the area of microarray data analysis. 

After that, I secured a competitive Ph.D. position at the Institute for Molecular Science, Japan. My doctoral study was focused on an archaeal proteasome assisted protein. I studied the mechanism of its various structural assemblies. I was able to solve the crystal structures of this protein, interestingly, which is different from its eukaryotic counterpart. 

This protein has a cage-like architecture that might modulate the encapsulation of smaller peptides under certain cellular stress conditions. Regarding my study, I have done protein engineering to create and modify such a cage-like structure. I finished my Ph.D. in 2017, where I applied multiple Structural Biology techniques, including Atomic Force Microscopy (HS-AFM), Cryo-EM, and X-ray Crystallography, etc.

In 2017, just after completion of my Ph.D., I was lucky enough to get an offer from the Czech Academy of Sciences, where I was working as a Postdoctoral Researcher. I worked on viral and membrane proteins with the help of X-ray Crystallization at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (IOCB), Prague. The objective of my project was to gain basic knowledge of the interaction between V-ATPase and lipid. To understand precisely how this cargo is moving in Golgi and how PI4P drives the localization, it was necessary to obtain structural information at the atomic level. In order to do that, I used X-ray crystallography and many other structural biology techniques.

Now I have come to the USA to do research on Cancer Signaling Pathways as this was my other childhood aspiration.