Overview

Dr. Sushmita Basu holds a Ph.D. in computational biology from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (2021), where her research, supervised by Prof. Ranjit Prasad Bahadur, focused on deciphering structural and functional aspects of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). She was also awarded the prestigious DST-INSPIRE fellowship during her doctoral studies. Prior to that, Dr. Basu completed a B.Tech in Biotechnology (Haldia Institute of Technology, 2012) and an M.Tech in Bioinformatics (WBUT, Salt Lake Campus, 2014), which laid the foundation for her transition into computational biology. Soon after submitting her thesis, she joined Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, as a Research Associate under Prof. Biman Jana, where she studied the role of solute-solvent interactions behind supra-molecular assembly formation. Thereafter, she pursued her postdoctoral research in Virginia Commonwealth University, USA, under Prof. Lukasz Kurgan from 2022. There, she further strengthened her expertise on IDPs, working on predictions of intrinsic disorder and their associated functions, alongside developing multiple web platforms including prediction tools and databases with advanced data visualization. Her dynamic research profile is also reflected by several impactful publications in reputed journals such as Nucleic Acids Research, Protein Science, Cellular Molecular Life Sciences, Angewandte Chemie, Journal of Molecular Biology, and Biophysical Journal. Dr. Basu joined as an Assistant Professor at the Pilani campus of BITS Pilani in October 2025. 

Research perspective

Dr. Basu's academic trajectory has been extremely interdisciplinary, where she sought answers to biological problems by means of computational methods. She conducted fundamental research to understand how protein sequence and structure (or lack of it) dictate its function and dynamics, using both data-driven and biophysics-based approaches. Her work actively involves advanced applications of data science, AI/ML, statistical analyses, development of bioinformatics web resources, including web servers and databases, complemented by molecular dynamics simulations, binding energy calculations, and enhanced sampling. Building on this foundation, she aims to establish a research team that will explore various avenues in the protein world and develop state-of-the-art computational resources, thereby significantly enhancing protein annotations.  The primary focus will be on the following broad thrust areas:

i) Understanding sequence–structure (or disorder)–function relationships in the context of human diseases

ii) Improving functional annotations of proteins through high-quality dataset curation and development of fast and/or accurate predictive frameworks

iii) Gaining mechanistic insights into molecular events using principles of biophysics

To follow her research work, refer to this link: Publications

More details on research projects to be updated soon.