Rupinder Kaur obtained MSc-Biotechnology (1993) from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.  She was awarded PhD (1999) in the area of yeast biology. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Tamar Enoch at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and with Dr. Brendan Cormack at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA. On return to India in 2006, she joined the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), Hyderabad as Staff Scientist.

Academic and Research Achievements: Dr. Kaur’s research is aimed at delineating the strategies that the human opportunistic fungal pathogen, Candida glabrata, employs to acquire resistance to antifungal drugs and survive antimicrobial environment of the mammalian host. Towards this end, Dr. Kaur has shown that C. glabrata suppresses the pro-inflammatory host immune response through its cell surface-associated proteolytic machinery of eleven aspartyl proteases. By integrating large-scale mutant screens, transcriptome and proteome studies and mouse bloodstream and gastrointestinal infection model analyses, she has shown that C. glabrata infection mechanisms include remodelling of the chromatin, actin cytoskeletal networks, and carbon metabolism, activation of multiple stress response systems, and regulated trafficking of plasma membrane nutrient transporters in fungal cells, and impeding phagolysosome acidification and NLRP3-inflammasome stimulation in host macrophages.

Awards and Honours: Dr Kaur is a recipient of Innovative Young Biotechnologist award (IYBA), National Women Bioscientist Award (Young Category) and the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Senior Fellowship. She is also a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad and Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. She is an elected member of the Guha Research Conference.