Tapas Kumar Kundu
Prof.
Tapas Kumar Kundu
FNASc. FASc., FNA., FAMS. and Sir J. C. Bose National Fellow,
Professor
Prof. Tapas K Kundu obtained his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1995 with best thesis award. Following his PhD, he had a short stint as a visiting foreign research associate in the National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Rockefeller University, USA (1996-99).
He joined JNCASR in 1999 as Faculty Fellow and is a Professor since 2009. He currently holds the position of Director at CSIR- Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.
Prof. Kundu has made significant contributions in the area of regulation of gene expression and its link to disease and therapeutics. He is not only elucidating the mechanisms of transcription regulation through the epigenetic modifications, but also targeting them to design new generation diagnostics, as well as therapeutics.
Remarkably, using Indian medicinal plant products, he discovered several natural, synthetic and semi-synthetic small molecule modulators of epigenetic enzymes, a few of which are already commercialized and being used all over the world as epigenetic research tools. A few are also being pursued as therapeutically relevant lead molecules.
He is the fellow of three major national academies of India and served as an editorial board member of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) from 2011-2016. He was instrumental to establish the Asian Forum for Chromatin and Chromosome Biology and Chemical Biology Society, India. Besides fundamental research, Prof. Kundu is also involved in teaching and organizing science outreach programs. His popular lectures on ‘Genes,Disease and Therapeutics’ have benefitted high school and college students greatly.
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