Sankar Ghosh is an Indian-American immunologist, microbiologist, and biochemist, who is the Chair and Silverstein & Hutt Family Professor of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Ghosh is best known for his pioneering research on the activation of cellular responses via NF-κB, a transcription factor that plays a critical role in regulating the expression of a large number of genes involved in the mammalian immune system. Ghosh's research led to the first cloning and characterization of NF-κB and IkB proteins, including the demonstration of the role of IkB phosphorylation in the activation of NF-κB. Over the years, Ghosh's research has been prominently published in numerous leading scientific journals. Ghosh was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023, to the National Academy of Medicine in 2022, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2021. He previously was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007 for his "distinguished contributions to the field of immunology, particularly for studies of the NF-kB signaling pathway."

Education

Ghosh received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1988. He then did his postdoctoral research training with Nobel Laureate Dr. David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute at MIT in Cambridge, MA. Ghosh previously received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Calcutta University in India. While in Baltimore's lab, Dr. Ghosh began his work in understanding the regulation of NF-κB. Ghosh was instrumental in identifying, cloning and characterizing key components of the NF-κB pathway and his research led to the publication of multiple papers in leading scientific journals, including Nature, Cell, and Science.

Career

After his success at the Baltimore lab, Ghosh began his independent research career at Yale University School of Medicine in 1991, serving as a professor in the Departments of Immunobiology and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry. At Yale, Ghosh's laboratory made numerous original findings that helped establish the mechanism of transcriptional regulation of NF-κB proteins, identification and characterization of signaling intermediates in innate and adaptive immune system, and identification and characterization of a subset of Toll-like receptors. At Yale, Ghosh was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Ghosh was awarded the 2005 Ranbaxy Research Award in Basic Science. In 2007, Ghosh was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2008, after 17 years at Yale, Ghosh was recruited to Columbia University and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center to become the Chair of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology. At Columbia, Ghosh continued his lab's pioneering research into NF-κB while broadening the lab's focus to address a wide variety of diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, Alzheimer's disease, sepsis, and cancer. Major research findings by Ghosh at Columbia have included establishing a central role of c-Rel in the suppression of anti-tumor activity, identifying a variant in a non-coding RNA that may contribute to the intestinal inflammation in celiac disease, and identifying specific microRNA biomarkers that potentially indicate a strong likelihood of poor prognosis for sepsis patients. Dr. Ghosh has served in an advisory capacity for several organizations including the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute, the Scientific Review Board of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and the Scientific Review Council of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. He also served as a member of the Board of Management of the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, as well as scientific advisory boards of Center for Life Sciences (CLS) for Peking University and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Shanghai Institute of Immunology, Shanghai, China, and Max-Planck Institute, Freiburg, Germany. He has served on the editorial board of multiple journals including Immunity, Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2011. Dr. Ghosh has been recognized for his highly cited publications as a Clarivate Analytics/Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher. In April 2021, Ghosh was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, then in October 2022 to the National Academy of Medicine, and in April 2023 to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Selected publications