Santanu Bhattacharya

Santanu Bhattacharya is an Indian chemist and chemical biologist and an honorary Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore where upon his return from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA, he joined as an Assistant Professor in 1991 and rose to the rank of a Professor in 2001. He is also an honorary fellow of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS Kolkata) where he served as the Director from 2015-2021. Since 2023, he is the Director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Tirupati (IISER-Tirupati). He is popular for his interdisciplinary work at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and materials science and introduced this style of investigation in India. His wide-ranging research on synthetic and natural lipids, gene delivery vehicles, natural and unnatural amino acids, oligopeptides, hydro- and organogels, bio-analytical sensors, cellular therapy mediate by gene transfection, molecular therapies design via G-quadruplex DNA binding, and biologically active natural product mimics is well known. He has been elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy New Delhi, The World Academy of Sciences Trieste, and the Indian Academy of Sciences Bangalore. In 2003, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Government of India's apex scientific research organization, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest Indian award in science, for his contributions to chemical sciences. He has also received the Department of Biotechnology's National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology (2002) and the UNESCO TWAS Prize (2010).