Affiliation: Henry M Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine

Dr. Sounak Ghosh Roy is presently working as Scientist I at the Henry M Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine. Before joining the present position, Dr. Ghosh Roy worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Internal Medicine-Nephrology, Yale School of Medicine, under the mentorship of Dr. Whitney Besse. Dr. Ghosh Roy obtained his PhD under Dr. Zahra Zakeri, professor of Biology at Queens College of the City University of New York. During his PhD, Sounak and his colleagues investigated the importance of the unfolded protein response (UPR) and macroautophagy in Dengue-2 (DENV-2) infection in mammalian cell culture. Their findings unravel a crucial role for a specific UPR pathway, PERK, in the upregulation of autophagy following infection. Currently, Sounak and his colleagues are investigating the role of UPR and related pathways (chaperones) in the maturation and processing of Polycystin-1 (PC1), which, when deregulated, causes Autosomal Polycystic Kidney disease (ADPKD), the most common monogenic kidney disease.