Bhawna Gupta, School of Biotechnology, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, KIIT University, India: “Disorders of Immunity: Ups and Downs in Rheumatoid Arthritis”

Sunil Raghav, Immunogenomics & Systems Biology Lab, Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India: “Targeting Dendritic Cell Immunometabolism to fine-tune immune-tolerance versus inflammation”

Host: Riitta Lahesmaa ( rilahes@utu.fi )

MIST research group students (PhD students and postdocs) are warmly welcome to join Bhawna and Sunil for lunch after the seminars. Please email Anne Lahdenperä ( ankahy@utu.fi ) to join the student lunch with Bhawna and Sunil.

MIST PIs are warmly welcome to meet Bhawna Gupta and Sunil Raghav on June 18th starting at 1 pm. Kindly contact Anne Lahdenperä ( ankahy@utu.fi ) to book your meeting time with them.

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Dr Bhawna Gupta completed her doctoral studies at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology at the University of Delhi, India and worked diligently to understand the role of immune cells in diseases and homeostasis. Her postdoctoral tenure included working at different laboratories, including
– the Ludwig Center for Cancer Research at CHUV, Lausanne, Switzerland;
– Dept of Bichemistry, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
– the Turku Center for Biotechnology, Finland

She currently has a research laboratory at the School of Biotechnology, KIIT University, India wherein, together with her research team of doctoral students and clinicians, she works to understand the pathogenesis, progression, diagnosis and prognosis of autoimmune diseases, with special emphasis on autoimmune inflammatory joint disorder rheumatoid arthritis.

In parallel, Dr Gupta has been teaching and training graduate and post graduate students at the School of Biotechnology, KIIT. She is also an entrepreneur, running a Food Tech company.

Link to Bhawna Gupta’s homepage: https://biotech.kiit.ac.in/profiles/bhawna-gupta/

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Sunil Raghav did his PhD at IGIB Delhi, which was followed by postdoc period as a SIMO SITRA and Academy of Finland Fellow in the Molecular Immunology group of Turku Bioscience Centre, Turku, Finland. After this postdoc period he worked as a Systems-X postdoctoral Scientist at EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland. He then joined ILS Bhubaneswar as Scientist-D and Ramalingaswami Fellow, and is currently Scientist-F at ILS Bhubaneswar.

With his Immuno-genomics & Systems Biology group at ILS, Sunil Raghav focuses on transcriptional control of pathogen or signal specific dendritic cell responses. The group employs systems level tools like high-throughput functional genomics, single cell genomics, population genomics, metabolomics and a variety of disease models for their studies. The current focus of the group is to identify molecular targets and metabolic switches that can be targeted to perturb T-cell function and ameliorate disease conditions.

Link to Sunil Raghav’s homepage: https://www.ils.res.in/scientists/sunil-k-raghav/