Sharmila Bhattacharya


Sharmila Bhattacharya is the Chief Scientist for Astrobionics and head of the Biomodel Performance and Behavior laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center. She is the Subject Matter Expert of the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and the Principal Investigator for Biomodel Performance Laboratory of Space Biosciences Division of NASA Ames Research Center. She was part of a projects like which sent fruit flies into the space to study human illnesses and to study the effects of radiation in space which will help space explorers. She has received the Ames Honor Award the successful launch of the MVP-Fly-01 experiment, 2018, NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, 2018, etc.

Early Life and Education

Sharmila Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata and lived in Park Street. Her father, Sukhdeb Bhattacharya, was an Indian Airlines pilot.
Sharmila Bhattacharya did her schooling from La Martiniere for Girls and Loreto House. After getting a bachelor's degree in Human Physiology in Presidency College, Kolkata and Biological Chemistry from Wellesley College, she started her career out as an undergraduate research assistant in the biochemistry lab at Princeton University. After that she earned her Master's degree and Ph.D. at Princeton University for her research in Molecular Biology, where she studied for the signal transduction pathway for the ras oncogene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. She then went on to do her post-doctoral research at Stanford University in Neurobiology.

Career

Soon after completing her research at Stanford she was awarded a job by Lockheed Martin to work at the NASA Ames Research Center. She was the principal investigator for the space shuttle flight experiment, Fungal Pathogenesis, Tumorigenesis, and Effects of Host Immunity in Space, which flew on STS-121 on July 4, 2006.
She was later promoted to the spot of Chief Scientist for Astrobionics at the NASA Ames Research Center. Her research at NASA has involved studying immune system changes during spaceflight and the effects of radiation and altered gravity on living systems.
Shen was also the Lecturer of Neurobiology in University of California, Santa Cruz in the year of 1998. She was the lead scientist on several projects of NASA Ames Research Center.

Selected Papers