Dhawan's father Satish Dhawan was a faculty at the Indian Institute of Science and Dhawan's mother Nalini, was a cytogeneticist. She completed her Masters in Botany from Delhi University in 1983. She contemplated quitting her master's degree however, a summer internship in yeast genetics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, convinced her to pursue a PhD. She completed her PhD from Boston University in 1991. She completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University studying muscle stem cells and gene therapy in 1995.
Career
Dhawan joined Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology as faculty in 1996 and started her lab studying the biology of muscle stem cells and muscle repair. From 2009–2014, she helped set up the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore and served as Senior Professor and Dean. In 2014, she returned to Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology and retained ties to InStem as a visiting professor and member of the advisory board. Dhawan has been an active advocate for establishing India as a leader in biomedical research. She serves as the Scientist In Charge of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology’s iHub, an innovation space with an incubation center for biomedical startups and has served on several scientific review committees, scientific task forces and advisory boards at the national and institutional level. She has also been a part on the editorial board of Physiological Genomics, BBRC and Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.
Selected publications
Sirisha Cheedipudi, Deepika Puri, Amena Saleh, Hardik P. Gala, Mohammed Rumman, Malini S. Pillai, Prethish Sreenivas, Reety Arora, Jeeva Sellathurai, Henrik Daa Schrøder, Rakesh K. Mishra, Jyotsna Dhawan, A fine balance: epigenetic control of cellular quiescence by the tumor suppressor PRDM2/RIZ at a bivalent domain in the cyclin a gene, Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 43, Issue 13, 27 July 2015, Pages 6236–6256
Srikar Krishna, Aparna Nair, Sirisha Cheedipudi, Deepak Poduval, Jyotsna Dhawan, Dasaradhi Palakodeti, Yashoda Ghanekar, Deep sequencing reveals unique small RNA repertoire that is regulated during head regeneration in Hydra magnipapillata, Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 41, Issue 1, 1 January 2013, Pages 599–616
MLL5, a trithorax homolog, indirectly regulates H3K4 methylation, represses cyclin A2 expression, and promotes myogenic differentiation Soji Sebastian, Prethish Sreenivas, Ramkumar Sambasivan, Sirisha Cheedipudi, Prashanth Kandalla, Grace K. Pavlath, Jyotsna Dhawan Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Mar 2009, 106 4719–4724; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0807136106
