Dipshikha Chakravortty
Dipshikha Chakravortty is an Indian microbiologist, molecular pathologist and a professor at the department of Microbiology and Cell Biology at the Indian Institute of Science. Known for her studies on Salmonella and antibacterial resistance, Chakravortty is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India and the Indian National Science Academy. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for her contributions to biosciences, in 2010.

Biography 

Dipshikha Chakravortty was born in 1968 at Jabalpur, in the second largest Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to Santosh Kumar and Bani Chakravortty. Her early schooling was in Mumbai where the family had moved soon after her birth. After earning a master's degree in microbiology from LAD College for Women of Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University, she did her doctoral studies, assisted by junior and senior research fellowships, under the guidance of K. S. Nandakumar at the National Centre for Cell Science which secured her a PhD from Savitribai Phule Pune University. Thereafter, she moved to Japan for her post-doctoral studies and completed it under the supervision of Takashi Yokochi of Aichi Medical University. Subsequently, she took up a research position at the laboratory of Michael Hensel in Erlangen, Germany and worked there on an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship. On her return to India in 2004, she joined the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as a faculty, where she holds the position of a professor. At IISc, she has established her laboratory, Molecular Pathogenesis Lab and hosts a number of researchers and scholars.

Chakravortty resides at IISc Campus, in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

Professional profile 

Chakravortty's research focus is on antibacterial resistance with special emphasis on Salmonella and she is known to have done work on the pathogenesis of Salmonella typhimurium, a gram negative bacterium pathogen. Her laboratory works on diseases such as Typhoid, and the host-pathogen interaction with regard to the disease, with a view to develop a vaccine with a long-time memory against the pathogen. The team led by her has been successful in developing a treatment protocol for sepsis which uses a Bactericidal/permeability-increasing protein, a type of glycoprotein, which has been found to neutralize the bacterial endotoxin, one of the primary causative factors of sepsis. Her studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and ResearchGate, an online repository of scientific articles has listed 169 of them. Besides, she has contributed chapters to books edited by others. She has also mentored many research scholars in their doctoral studies.

Awards and honors 
The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards in 2010. The National Academy of Sciences, India elected her as a fellow in 2012 ans she became an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2017.
Awarded NASI-Reliance Platinum Jubilee Award, 2015
Awarded the DAE SRC Outstanding Investigator Award, 2015
Awarded Humboldt fellowship award in Germany .
On 16 November 2017 she worked along IISc Team and won gold medal at iGEM 2017 and iGEM 2018 contest, Boston, USA

Selected bibliography

Chapters

Articles 
Balakrishnan A, Chakravortty D, 2017,  Bactericidal/permeability increasing- Epithelial cell damage activates protein  expression in epithelial cells, Frontier in Microbiology, 2017 Aug 15;8:1567. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.01567.

Datey A, Janardhan Gm Gopalan J, Chakravortty D,2017, Mechanism of transformation in Mycobacteria using a novel shockwave assisted technique driven by in situ generated oxyhydrogen, Sci Rep,  2017 Aug 17;7(1):8645. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-08542-5.

Balakrishnan A, DasSarma P, Bhattacharjee O, Kim JM, DasSarma S, Chakravortty D. 2017, Halobacterial nano vesicles displaying murine bactericidal permeability-increasing protein rescue mice from lethal endotoxic shock., Sci Rep. Sep 20;6:33679.

Balakrishnan A, Schnare M, Chakravortty D. 2016 Of men not mice: Bactericidal/permeability-increasing protein (BPI) expressed in human macrophages acts as a phagocytic receptor and modulates entry and replication of Gram-negative bacteria., Frontiers in Immunol. 7,455.

Das P, Lahiri A, Chakravortty D,2010, Modulation of the arginase pathway in the context of microbial pathogenesis: a metabolic enzyme moonlighting as an immune modulator. PLoS Pathog, 6, e1000899.