By Irene Hsiao
Congratulations to Kasturi Chakraborty (PhD 2019) for winning the Schmidt Science Fellowship, awarded by Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust to excellent emerging scientists to support a year of postdoctoral research in fields substantially different from their current fields of expertise. In addition to a generous stipend, the Schmidt Fellowship includes participation in a global meeting series, during which fellows visit industrial and academic institutions in the US and the UK to gain exposure to top scientists in many fields, develop leadership and communication skills, and learn about policy and advocacy in the public and private sectors. Chakraborty, a fifth-year in Yamuna Krishnan’s laboratory, is the University of Chicago’s first Schmidt Fellow.
Born in Kolkata, India, Chakraborty completed a BS in chemistry at St. Stephen’s College at the University of Delhi before pursuing an MS in organic chemistry at the University of Pune. Recalling how her father, an organic chemist, built origami models of molecules and how her mother, a clinical psychologist, worked with children suffering from disease, Chakraborty traces her desire to take a chemical approach to studying biological problems to their early influence. This combination of interests led her to the Krishnan lab. “I saw Yamuna was from a chemistry background, and I liked her outlook and what she was doing,” says Chakraborty. “In her lab, I went from synthesizing molecules as an organic chemist to working with C. elegans.”
At the University of Chicago, Chakraborty has focused on the development of DNA nanodevices for the detection of ions in lysosomes to examine how these organelles function. By correlating ionic imbalances with lysosomal disease severity, these tools can enable quantitative detection of disease phenotypes in cells derived from patients. This work has led to several collaborations with Fred Ausubel at Harvard, Dimitri Krainc at Northwestern, and Paschalis Kratsios and Lev Becker at UChicago and has resulted in thirteen papers, four as first author. “UChicago is an amazing place to do collaborative work,” she says, acknowledging support from Krishnan, her collaborators, and UChicagoGRAD. Chakraborty defended her thesis, “DNA-Based Nanodevices Probe Lysosomal Diseases by Chemical Imaging,” in March 2019.
As a Schmidt Fellow, Chakraborty intends to study host-microbiome interactions in mammalian intestines. In humans, the genome of the communities of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that live in and on the body, known as the microbiome, far exceeds the size of the human genome. “Alterations in the microbiome are connected to many diseases,” says Chakraborty. “We need a lot of interdisciplinary work to understand it, and as a chemist I aim to make tools to help understand what the microbiome is doing.”