Tapas Kumar Kundu

Biography

Born on 2 January 1962 at Hili, a border town in the Indian state of West Bengal to Kalachand Kundu and Dipali couple, Tapas Kumar Kundu graduated in agriculture (BSc hons) from Bidhan Chandra Agricultural University in 1986 and completed his master's degree in biochemistry from University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore in 1989, winning a gold medal for standing first in the master's degree examination. He enrolled for doctoral studies at the Indian Institute of Science in 1990 and secured a PhD under the guidance of M. R. S. Rao in 1995 for his thesis, Zinc-Metalloprotein Nature of Rat Spermatidal Protein TP2 and its Interactions with DNA. After a short stint at the National Institute of Genetics, Japan during 1995–96 as a visiting foreign research associate, he did his post-doctoral studies at the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Rockefeller University during 1996–99. Returning to India the same year, he joined Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research at their Molecular Biology and Genetics Unit where he became an assistant professor in 2005 and heads the Transcription and Disease Laboratory of the institution in the capacity of a JNCASR Silver Jubillee Professor since 2015.

Kundu is a life member and a former vice president of the Society of Biological Chemists, India and is its incumbent president. He is a nominated member of American Chemical Society and American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a member of the American Society for Microbiology. He was among the biologists who founded the Chemical Biology Society, India of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in 2013 and serves as it secretary. An adjunct professor at the Special Centre for Molecular Medicine of Jawaharlal Nehru University, he served as a member of the Reader Panel of Nature journal and is a former member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (June 2011–September 2016).

Legacy

Kundu's researches are principally focused on the regulation of transcription and P53 function using chromatin and associated proteins as well as on the functional genomics of transcriptional co-activators. His researches assisted in the identification of PC4 and its role as a functional component of chromatin and as an activator of P53. He demonstrated the histone chaperone activity and the acetylation of chromatin transcription and these findings have been reported to have helped in identifying new drug candidates. Extending his researches to cancer and AIDS therapeutics, he has identified small molecule modulators of chromatin modifying enzymes, a discovery which is reported to be helpful in developing new therapeutic protocols.

Kundu has published one book, Epigenetics: Development and Disease, and a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals and Google Scholar, an online article repository, has listed 215 of them. Several of his research findings have been put to commercial use by various companies and he holds several patents for his works which include processes and compounds. He has delivered a number of featured lectures and is one of the organizers of the Asian Forum for the Chromatin and Chromosome Biology, a biennial event for the students and researchers of epigenetics and chromatin biology from Asian countries. He is also involved in popularizing science in the rural areas through science outreach programs and has delivered a series of lectures on Genes, Disease and Therapeutics, with student community as the audience.

Awards and honors

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 2005 and he received the National Bioscience Award for Career Development (N-BIOS Prize) from the Department of Biotechnology, the same year. Three years later, he was selected for the National Academy of Sciences, India-Reliance Industries Platinum Jubilee Award in 2008 for his contributions to biological sciences. In 2011, he received the G. D. Birla Award for Scientific Research of the K. K. Birla Foundation and the Ranbaxy Research Award. He is also a recipient of the India Innovation Award 2012 of Merck Millipore.

Kundu, a recipient of the 1993 International Council of Scientific Union Award, is an elected member of the Guha Research Conference and a fellow of the Union for International Cancer Control (2001 and 2005). He was elected as a fellow by the National Academy of Sciences, India in 2005 and he became an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy in 2008 and 2009 respectively. The Department of Science and Technology awarded him the J. C. Bose National Fellowship in 2010 and he has delivered several award orations including the 2010 lecture of the Tohoku Medical Society, Japan. He is also a recipient of Monbukagakusho Scholarship of the Government of Japan (1996), Post-doctoral fellowship of the Human Frontier Science Program (2001) and Collaborative Research fellowship of ARCUS-India (2005–08).

Patents

The list may be incomplete.