Soumi Chatterjee

Soumi is an international PhD student joining us from the City of Joy, Kolkata, India. She has completed her Integrated Master’s degree in Biotechnology from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.

At Telethon Kids Institute, Soumi is pursuing her PhD from Curtin University, under the co-supervision of  Dr. Archita Mishra and Dr. Ankur Sharma. Her PhD project involves developing a spatial transcriptomic method to simultaneously profile microbes as well as host immune cells gene expression profile. Using this technology she will work on a spatial immune-microbiome colocalization atlas to study host-microbiome interaction in healthy vs diseased ecosystems in early life environment.

Prior to this, she worked at Tata Translational Cancer Research Centre as a Research Assistant (genomics). Here, she was involved in the ICiCLe ALL-14-a phase IV, multicentric, national clinical trial for newly diagnosed Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia patients, where she investigated novel driver mutations and developed sensitive techniques for Measurable Residual Disease detection.

Apart from academia, Soumi is an avid social worker. She holds the post of Youth motivator at the West Bengal Voluntary Blood donor forum and has been the President of the Rotaract Club. She is also a budding artist and keen about representing her science through art and communicating her research.