We currently have three PhD positions available in the field of Membrane Biophysics and Fluorescence Microscopy. Interested candidates may kindly apply through IIT Kharagpur PhD admission portal (https://www.iitkgp.ac.in/phd-admission).
We are an experimental biophysics research group located at the Department of Chemistry, IIT Kharagpur. Our research, in the interface of biology and physical chemistry, is centrally based around fascinating structural, dynamical, and (soft) material properties of plasma membranes of mammalian cells. The biophysical properties of plasma membranes, which are dynamically tuned by membrane composition and surrounding cellular components such as cortical cytoskeleton, play critical roles in numerous biological processes. A key focus of our laboratory is to develop novel principles of membrane dynamics and organization related to cellular signaling and communication by employing high-resolution spectroscopy and microscopy techniques. Currently, we are focussing on transmembrane signaling mechanisms via growth factor receptors and immunoreceptors as well as intercellular communication mediated by cell derived vesicles. We use a wide range of state-of-the-art biophysical techniques including single-spot fluorescence correlation or fluctuation spectroscopy (FCS or FFS), camera-based Imaging FCS (ImFCS), fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM), confocal microscopy, total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and electron microscopy (EM) as well as conventional biochemical and molecular biology tools.