Cancer and Noncoding RNAs

Dr. Chakrabarti earned his PhD from the City University of New York. He conducted postdoctoral training at University of Rochester, New York; the Institute of Theoretical Science in Eugene, Oregon; and the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) in Kolkata, India and a Principle Investigator at Gyanxet-Beta, a commercial lab which develops tools and resources for RNA bioinformatics. Dr. Chakrabarti’s research areas include the role of noncoding RNAs in human disease, specifically in viral infections and head and neck cancer, as well as stem cells and pluripotency and the development of bioinformatics tools for analyzing noncoding RNAs. He has more than fifteen years of research experience in epigenetics, focusing on noncoding RNAs, and more than twenty-five years teaching experience at IACS. In addition to his teaching and research, Dr. Chakrabarti has published more than fifty scientific papers in peer reviewed journals and has served on the editorial boards of Scientific Reports, Bioinformatics, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, Nucleic Acids Research, DNA Research, Human Mutations, PLOS Computational Biology, and BMC Genomics. His lab at IACS has collaborated on epigenetic research with labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, Stanford University, and the University of Bielefeld, among others. Since 2010 Sanga Mitra has served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) in Kolkata, India, under the mentorship of her PhD advisor, Jayprokas Chakrabarti. Her research areas within the Computational Biology group at IACS include microarray and RNA-Sequencing data analysis, histone modifications, head and neck cancer, and tRNA gene annotation. She holds an M.S. in Bioinformatics and has recently submitted her PhD dissertation, “Computational Genomics and miRNomics of Cancer.” Sanga Mitra has also presented on her research at genomics, cancer, and bioinformatics conferences around the world, most notably at BIT’s 3rd World DNA and Genome Day, New Horizons in Cancer Research, and the International Conference on Stem Cells and Cancer. She has published eight scientific papers to-date in peer reviewed journals including RNA and Transcription, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, Scientific Reports, Genomic Medicine, and Cancer Biomarkers. Dr. Tollefsbol is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and a Senior Scientist in the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, Integrative Center for Aging Research, Nutrition Obesity Research Center, University Wide Microbiome Center, and the Comprehensive Diabetes Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He is Director of the UAB Cell Senescence Culture Facility which he established in 1999. Dr. Tollefsbol trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Research Professor with members of the National Academy of Science at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. He earned doctorates in molecular biology and osteopathic medicine from the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center and his bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Houston. He has received prior funding from the NCI, NHLBI, NIMH and other federal institutes as well as the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), and the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) among many other sources.