Biophysical Society Bulletin | September 2019

Biophysicists in Profile

Swati Bhattacharya and Akash Bhattacharya Areas of Research Swati: Bottom-up, multi-level modeling of biomolecular systems Akash: Extending analytical ultracentrifugation methodology to the biological mesoscale

Institution Swati: Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay Akash: Beckman Coulter Life Sciences

At-a-Glance

Siblings Swati Bhattacharya and Akash Bhattacharya did not always expect that they would end up working in the same field, but when they both ended up studying biophysics, collaborating seemed like a perfect fit. They agree that the best part of working with a sibling is feeling unafraid to ask stupid questions.

Swati Bhattacharya

Akash Bhattacharya

Swati and Akash Bhattacharya’s parents, an English teacher and geologist, did their best to introduce the children to the fun of science when they were young, helping them to engage with the natural world and introducing them to concepts far beyond their level in school, “like fractions in kindergar-

me to take up biophysics,” she shares. “I worked on polymer physics for my PhD, and my work was primarily computation- al, but most of the group was actively engaged in biophysics and I was fascinated.”

The siblings’ paths diverged follow- ing their undergraduate years. When Akash was considering his path for graduate studies, “My sister point- ed out that I did have an aptitude for lab work and I should play to my strengths,” he says. “So that was what I did.” He started his PhD in the NMR spectroscopy lab of Anil Kumar at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). “This was pure methodology work, long on spin physics, short on pipetting,” he explains. Following the advice of several bio-NMR scientists, including Siddharth Sharma , also at IISc, he moved to the University of Michigan for his PhD work, joining Erik Zuiderweg’s lab in the biophysics department. “Michigan was NMR heaven, with Zuiderweg as senior

ten,” says Swati. “I’m not sure how much of it actually penetrated, but we always knew that [father] was some sort of scientist and that was a marvelous thing to be.” By the time he was in sixth grade, Akash had put together a home chemistry lab. “Quite soon I was well on my way to making organic indicators and trying to electroplate the household crock- ery,” he says. For her part, Swati was attracted to mathematics from an early age, and once her physics lessons began in- corporating more math, her interests shifted toward the subject. She was accepted into the physics department of Presidency College, Calcutta, which was a dream come true. Akash found

Swati and Akash Bhattacharyn as children

spin prophet, Al-Hashimi as the up and coming RNA special- ist, and Ramamoorthy as the solid-state NMR expert,” Akash says. “This is where I became a card-carrying experimental biophysicist.” For her postdoc, Swati moved to University of Illinois, Urba- na-Champaign, where she worked on computational studies of nanopore sensors in the lab of Aleksei Aksimentiev . “That was when I was properly initiated into the world of biophys- ics,” she says. “We worked using molecular simulations on various aspects of bionanotechnology, particularly probing nanopore platforms for DNA sequencing. It was exhilarat-

himself following in his sister’s footsteps, and a year after she began her undergraduate studies, he joined her in the physics department at Presidency. “Presidency was awesome,” he shares. “The professors were great, but they did suffer from a regrettable tendency to wonder aloud if I was as capable as my sister. I was not.” During her undergraduate studies, Swati took several courses under Jayanta Bhattacharjee , which nudged her toward statis- tical physics. She moved to T. A. Vilgis ’ group at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, for her PhD. “The exposure that I got in Mainz was what propelled

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