Winner of Infosys Award is a scientist from Bengal
She is a scientist from Bengal who has won multiple awards including the recent Infosys Award of the year for her path breaking research in cancer, but ISI director Sanghamitra Bandopadhyay is as humble as ever. She loves to be remembered and called just a scientist rather than be known as the director of Indian Statistical Institute. She has been working on cancer, Alzheimer’s and HIV-induced diseases for a decade now, and has been successful in creating computer-efficient algorithms to analyse biological data, to gain new insights into cell behaviour.
Bandopadhyay and her team are trying to graph any human cell in its entirety. Her mapping of the behavioural pattern of cancer cells has been quite revolutionary and accepted across the world. She has extensively researched on breast and colon cancers to locate their starting point and what triggers them. Her wok starts at the micro RNA level and she tries to find out how these cells interact during protein formation and how their dysfunction and mutation can lead to deadly diseases like cancer. The data that she generates through statistics in her laboratory is used by bio-researchers to understand the key to these diseases. Incidentally, Sanghamitra Bandopadhyay has also won the Bhatnagar Award, the country’s highest award for science.
