Santanu Bhattacharya earned his BSc (Hons) and MSc degrees in Chemistry from Calcutta University, after which he joined Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, where he worked in the area of Bio-organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology under the supervision of Professor Robert A Moss. Subsequently he had a post-doctoral stint with Professor Har Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on the signal transduction of membrane proteins. He is currently at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and is also an honorary faculty member at the Chemical Biology Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore since 1997.

Academic and Research Achievements: On returning to India, Bhattacharya started a bio-organic and supramolecular chemistry laboratory at IISc. He initiated both teaching and research programmes in chemical biology. His current research activities are at the interfaces of chemistry and biology or materials science. His specific projects include: lipid molecular design and biophysics, cytofectins for gene transfection, peptide design for sequence-specific DNA recognition, structural studies of complex fluids such as micelles, novel surfactants and investigation of their aggregation, low molecular mass gelators and design and synthesis of nanomaterials. He has published over 140 research articles and book chapters, and has mentored about 15 PhD students and over 12 MS students, as well as a number of post-doctoral Fellows.

Other Contributions: Dr Bhattacharya is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Chemical Society Journal Langmuir. He is also a senior Editor of the journal, Nano Trends.

Awards and Honours: Professor Bhattacharya received the BM Birla Prize (1997), Swarnajayanti Fellowship Award, DST (1998-2003), MRSI Medal (1999), National Bioscience Award for Career Development, DBT (2002), SS Bhatnagar Prize, CSIR (2003), Bhagyatara National Award, Panjab University (2004), Central Drug Research Institute Award, CDRI (2004), D Ranganathan Memorial Lecture Award, CRSI (2007), Nitya Anand Endowment Lecture Award, INSA (2007), GD Birla Award (2007) and JC Bose Fellowship, DST (2008). He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore.