Dibyendu Sarkar obtained BSc (1989) from the Presidency College, University of Calcutta and MSc (1991) from the Department of Biophysics, Molecular Biology and Genetics, University of Calcutta. He worked with Professor Chanchal DasGupta (1991- and was awarded PhD (1997) in the area of Protein Folding and Unfolding studies. He worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (1998-2002) with Professor Arthur Landy in the MCB Department of Brown University, USA. His research work involved studies on mechanisms of lambda site-specific recombination. On return to India, he joined the CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology at Chandigarh as an independent investigator. He is presently working as a Chief Scientist at CSIR-IMTECH.
Academic and Research Achievements: Dr Sarkar’s research was focused to understand how M. tuberculosis phoP-phoR functions as a virulence regulator. Results from his laboratory establish the physiological relevance of this two-component system in the tubercle bacilli and continue to be his most original and meaningful contribution as evident from the citations of the work. The outcome of these results has significant implications in mechanism of virulence regulation of the bacilli. Over the years, he has published over 30 research articles in different international journals of repute, and under his direct supervision more than 15 students received their doctoral degree.
Other Contributions: Dr Sarkar has been actively reviewing papers from various international journals, doctoral thesis and grant proposals from various national funding agencies including DBT, SERB and MHRD. During the pandemic, Dr Sarkar and his team had developed a fully functional COVID19 testing facility at the CSIR-IMTECH. He was the coordinator for testing COVID-19 samples at CSIR-IMTECH, and the facility was operational from April, 2020 to around March, 2022.
Awards and Honours: Dr Sarkar is a recipient of National Bioscience Award for Career Development (2011) from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India. He is a member of the prestigious Guha Research Conference (GRC) (2011) and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad (2019).
