Ujjyani Ghosh

I grew up in the cultural capital of India, Calcutta. As a kid, I wanted to become an astronaut, but changed my plans when life tricked me into choosing a different path. I pursued microbiology as my major and graduated from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta with a master's degree. I went on to work as a quality control analyst in industry, which is when I discovered my love for research. I joined the University of Calcutta as a research assistant and studied how alteration of codon usage bias in glutamyl tRNA synthetase can affect cellular fitness, protein expression and folding in E.coli.

Although years of graduate school trained me to think like a scientist, I consider myself a philosopher. I am highly curious about the existence of life and love to travel around the world and meet exotic people and learn about their cultures. This wanderlust is what inspired me to move to the US to pursue my PhD. Besides my research, I love interior designing, reading stuff about space, brain psychology and currently, learning to play the violin.

Research

My project involves engineering cellular transcriptional biosensors that can determine functional infectivity and life cycle of virus particles at spatiotemporal resolution for high throughput, virus mediated-directed evolution campaigns. I am currently identifying the transcriptional architectures that are specific to different Sindbis virus infection models. I am also optimizing tools for validating these biosensors by studying functional mRNA regulators for synthetic biology applications.