Dr. Richa Karmakar

Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Dr. Karmakar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. Her research work focused on the fundamentals of prokaryotic and eukaryotic chemotaxis. Dr. Karmakar plans to build a low-cost Lab-on-a-chip device for rapid detection of antibiotic susceptibility of bacteria. Also, she wanted to investigate cell-cell and cell-substrate adhesion during the migration of eukaryotic cells such as neutrophils. She is also the part of Centre for Micro Nano Bio-Fluidics Group, IIT Madras. Dr. Karmakar received her B. Tech in Biotechnology followed by M. Tech in Food Technology and Biochemical engineering. She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India in 2016. In her Ph.D., she was working on quantitative experiments to understand prokaryotic chemotaxis. There she studied the response of E. coli to varying concentrations and gradients of attractants and repellents and the rheological response of a suspension of E. coli. Dr. Karmakar subsequently joined the Department of Physics at the University of California San Diego, USA, as a Post Doctoral fellow. She served the department as a lecturer as well and taught undergraduate Physics. She investigated the chemotactic behaviour of Dictyostelium discoideum (eukaryotic cells) in microfluidic devices and establish the cellular memory in presence of attractant. After that, she was appointed as an Assistant Project Scientist at the University of California San Diego and worked as an experimentalist to evaluate the biophysical aspects of Eukaryotic chemotaxis.