Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Archives

Vidita Vaidya

Prof. Vidita Vaidya is Professor and Chairperson, the Department of Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Prof. Vaidya’s research group at TIFR works on understanding the neurocircuitry of emotion, its modulation by life experience, and the alterations in emotional neurocircuitry that underlie complex psychiatric disorders, like anxiety and depression. Her work delves into how the experience of early adversity can recruit pathways regulated by the neurotransmitter, serotonin, to shape the long-term programming of mood-related behavior. Her research team also investigates the mechanistic details of the influence of pharmacological antidepressants and serotonergic psychedelics on mood-related behavior, in particular the consequences on bioenergetics in neuronal cells.

Prof. Vaidya received her undergraduate training at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Yale University. Following postdoctoral fellowships at Karolinska Institute and Oxford University, she returned to a faculty position at TIFR in 2000. She was the recipient of the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2022. She is committed to mentorship, equity and diversity in STEM.

Prof. Vaidya’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project is focussed on understanding the impact of serotonergic psychedelics on mitochondrial biogenesis and function in distinct limbic brain regions. Her work explores whether serotonergic psychedelics, through modulation of mitochondrial biogenesis and function, impact neuronal and synaptic plasticity, influence neuronal architecture and regulate mood-related behaviors.

Ranabir Das

Dr. Ranabir Das is Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He has worked extensively on the mechanisms used by viruses and bacteria to hijack the human cell signaling pathways and shut off the host’s immune response. Dr. Das’ laboratory has shown how the family of Herpes simplex viruses uses human proteins to transcribe the viral DNA and produce viral proteins. His lab showed how the proteins from Shigella shut down the immune response in a human and replicated efficiently. These studies have provided novel insights into how pathogens survive inside the host and have helped identify new therapeutic targets for drug discovery.

Dr. Das has published 23 papers in the last five years in several journals, like Nature Communications, the Journal of American Chemical Society, eLife, ChemComm among others. Multiple grant agencies have generously funded his research work. Dr. Das has received the prestigious Prof. S. Subramanian 60th Birthday Lecture Award, the Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship and the NCI Director’s Innovation Award among several others. He has been a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Biophysical Society, and the NMR Society of India.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Das is working to understand how the pathogenic bacteria Shigella silences the inflammatory response in the intestinal cells to multiply effectively. This work may help identify new therapeutic targets to counter multi-drug resistant Shigella infection.

Lubhanshi

Lubhanshi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai. Her thesis focuses on the specificity of effector proteases towards host proteins that are crucial in host proteasomal degradation pathways. Using techniques such as fluorescence spectroscopy and mutational analysis, she is looking for the mechanism of selective recognition of ubiquitin-like proteins by deubiquitinating enzymes.

Lubhanshi holds a bachelor’s degree in science from Kurukshetra University, and a master’s degree in chemistry from Guru Jambeshwar University of Science and Technology, Haryana. As a researcher, she likes to participate in science outreach programs.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Lubhanshi is exploring the host pathways that are affected by the deubiquitinating enzymes. Primarily, her focus lies in understanding how various effector proteases impact the host’s ubiquitination machinery, thereby facilitating the pathogens’ survival and replication. In her leisure time, she likes to sketch and paint. She enjoys travelling and exploring nature and diverse food from various cultures.

Sudip Bhattacharyya

Prof. Sudip Bhattacharyya is a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, Maharashtra. He is also the current Payload Manager of the Soft X-ray Telescope aboard AstroSat, the first dedicated Indian astronomy satellite. He primarily works on extremely compact cosmic objects, such as neutron stars and black holes. These objects provide excellent opportunities to probe extreme aspects of physics, such as strong gravity, high magnetic field, accretion-ejection mechanism, high-density degenerate matter, and gravitational waves, which cannot be studied in terrestrial laboratories. Prof. Bhattacharyya studies these objects primarily using X-ray satellite data and theoretical modelling. Prof. Bhattacharyya did his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, and was a Research Associate at the University of Maryland at College Park and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the USA, before joining a faculty position at TIFR in 2007. He received the NASA Space Science Achievement Award in 2007.

Prof. Bhattacharyya’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project aims to study the evolution of rapidly spinning neutron stars to probe their fundamental aspects. The project can be relevant for several Indian and U.S. observatories.