Dr Somenath Bakshi
- Associate professor
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About
Somenath Bakshi is an Associate Professor interested in quantitative microbiology. He is a single molecule biophysicist by training. He did his PhD in University of Wisconsin Madison under Professor James Weisshaar – developing super-resolution imaging technologies to study central cellular processes in microbes. After finishing his PhD, he moved to Harvard University for his postdoc with Professor Johan Paulsson. During his postdoc Somenath developed high-throughput timelapse imaging technologies of single microbes in controlled complex growth-conditions. Though most of his work has focused on developing methods and approaches to synthetic biology, he remains interested in quantifying the dynamics and control of natural circuits.
Research
- Engineering and characterising genetic control circuits in bacteria
- Engineering and characterising therapeutic phage viruses
- Single-cell analysis of phage infection kinetics in bacteria
- Single cell analysis of antibiotic persistence and collective tolerance
- Developing quantitative methods for microbiology: Microscopy, Microfluidics, and Machine-learning
Dr Bakshi is trained as a single molecule biophysicist and has spent several years developing methodologies and applying them to understand the spatial biology and dynamics of the physiology and gene-expression in microbes under complex growth conditions. Currently, his lab is extending such tools to investigate the dynamics of synthetic and natural genetic circuits and microbial eco-systems at the single-cell level and use control theoretic approaches to analyze them.
Understanding such systems will play a crucial role in designing novel probiotic approaches towards diagnostics and treatment of gut-related symptoms. One major goal of the lab is to also extend the work of microbial communities to understand their interaction with plants, and improve plant health, growth, and productivity. In these regards, their research relates to several agendas of the UN sustainable development goals, including ‘zero hunger’ and ‘good health and wellbeing’.