People

Pradipta Ghosh, MD

Those who knew Pradipta as a child would agree that she is easily bored if not constantly challenged. Building a knowledge base that is very broad and deep was her way to take on the challenge in exploring anything that she knew little or nothing about. After graduating as the Best Outgoing Student in a nationwide ranking, from the top medical school in India, Pradipta came to US in 2001 in search of the next challenge, that of a career in biomedical science. This twist in career was prompted by a famous quote that she had stumbled upon -- "Medicine is not only an art; it is also a science. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided". Determined to get trained in a good laboratory, she applied to Universities in US with little or no hope of hearing back. Her dream materialized when her resume trickled through the system and fell in the hands of Stuart Kornfeld at Washington University St Louis, MO, a seasoned physician-scientist and a great mentor, an astute judge of character and talent, who agreed to give Pradipta an opportunity to train in his laboratory. Pradipta was quick to realize that this rare opportunity comes with extraordinary challenges ahead because she was about to enter a dual-career path, that of a physician-scientist, with no prior training as a scientist and years of rigorous internship, residency and fellowship in US ahead of her. She was introduced to experimental medicine in the Kornfeld laboratory, where she took the very first steps in her scientific career. Soon her vocation became her passion and what followed during the next 18 months was nothing short of magic. Her work investigated how adaptor proteins, GGAs and AP1&2, affected sorting of Mannose-6 Phosphate Receptors (MPRs) and directly led to the discovery of a layer of complexity in the multi-step sorting of the receptor in-and-out of the Golgi. Through her publications within the next year, a novel paradigm emerged in the field of protein trafficking where series of ying-yang phospho- and dephosphorylation events regulate each step of receptor trafficking based on the temporospatial distribution of the respective kinases or phosphatases. If St Louis winters were cold, or summers hot, Pradipta would not know because she was in the lab round-the-clock acquiring the scientific tools and building her technical expertise. She recalls that the learning curve was steep, but she enjoyed every moment of the journey, gaining unique perspective and broadening her horizon with every passing day. She describes her time spent in the Kornfeld lab as the most formative years of her scientific career because it served as a solid foundation for the years to come.

In 2003, Pradipta moved to University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to begin her clinical training in Internal Medicine. After fast-tracking through her internship and residency in the physican-scientist training pathway, she joined the UC San Diego Gastroenterology Fellowship Program in 2005. A year later, she began her postdoctoral research training in the George Palade laboratories under the mentorship of Dr. Marilyn G. Farquhar, PhD Equipped with the skills of a biochemist, this is where she honed her skills as a cellular and molecular biologist, and further broadened her horizon by incorporating systems biology, computational modeling and bioinformatics into her research program. Her postdoctoral work on a newly discovered protein, GIV/Girdin, established the presence of a novel class of signaling molecules and unraveled hitherto unknown functions of these molecules in cell biology and pathophysiology. In 2008 she graduated from the Gastroenterology fellowship program and joined as an Assistant Professor on tenure track in the department of Medicine at UC San Diego. Ongoing work in her laboratory seeks to identify novel signal amplifiers/rheostats in a systematic and unbiased way using a three-pronged approach. Using these approaches her laboratory has already identified new rheostats with surprising functions during cellular processes such as membrane-trafficking, autophagy, survival, apoptosis, mitosis, differentiation and migration. Once systematically applied, these approaches have the real potential to revolutionize our understanding of signal transduction and the diverse biological processes and disease states that they control.

Dr Ghosh currently devotes ~10% of her time in clinical services. Every Friday morning she either sees patients in a subspeciality outpatient clinic (Hepatology) or performs procedures in endoscopy suits at the VA Medical Center, La Jolla.

Pradipta's Research Mentors:

• (August 2001 - May 2003): Stuart A. Kornfeld, MD
• (September 2006 - November 2008): Marilyn G. Farquhar, PhD

Professional Experience: 

Awards & Honors

• 2013- Medical Student Research Mentor Award (American Heart Association)
• 2013- Mentor on DOD Visionary fellowship award (CDMRP)
• 2013- Clinical Research Mentor Award (Doris Duke Charitable Foundation)
• 2010- Clinical Scientist Development Award (CSDA, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation)
• 2010- RSA(AGA) Rising Star, Europe-US Joint Session Lecturer, DDW, New Orleans, USA.
• 2009- Gregory J. Gurtner Memorial Lecturer, Washington U, St Louis, MO, USA. 
• 2009- Career Awards for Medical Scientists (Burroughs Wellcome Foundation)
• 2008- American Gastroenterology Association Research Scholar Award (Foundation for Digestive Health and Nutrition, FDHN) 

Lab Manager
	Nina Sun Email: nnsun@ucsd.edu

Postdoctoral Fellows / Graduate Students / Visiting Scholars
	Ying Dunkel, MD, PhD MD & PhD in Pathology, China Medical University Staff Research Associate, Ghosh Lab (October, 2010-Present) ydunkel@ucsd.edu; yingdunkel@yahoo.com		Cristina Rohena, PhD Doctorate in Cell and Structural Biology (University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio) Fellow, Moores Cancer Center. Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-Present) Cancer Therapeutics (CT2) T32 Fellow, Moores Cancer Center
	Jason Ear, PhD Doctorate in Cell and Developmental Biology (University of California, Los Angeles) Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-Present)		Lee Swanson Biomedical Sciences Graduate Student (2015-Present) GI Division T32 Predoctoral Fellow (2015-2018)
	Nicholas (Nick) Kalogriopoulos Biomedical Sciences Graduate student, Batch of 2013, NCI Cancer Cell Biology Predoctoral Fellow (Aug 2014-July 2016) Email: nkalogri@ucsd.edu		Nicolas Aznar, PhD MS and PhD in Molecular, Cellular and Cancer Biology, Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire, Signalisation et Cancer, The National Center For Scientific Research (CNRS), Lyon, FRANCE. Postdoctoral Fellow, Ghosh Lab (March, 2011- Present) Email:naznar@ucsd.edu
	Linda P. Joosen, B.Sc, Molecular Biology Staff Research Associate (2016 - present) Specialization: Molecular Cytology, Genetics and Cell biology; Live cell imaging
Undergraduate Student Employees
	Anokhi Saklecha Undergraduate Student, UCSD Student Research Assistant (2015-Present) Intern at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, United States		​Camille Delbrook Undergraduate Student Research Assistant, UCSD (2016-Present)
	Evelyn Yang Undergraduate Student Research Assistant, UCSD  (2016-Present)		Somya Moyya Undergraduate Student Research Assistant, UCSD  (2016-Present)
	Trina Amog Undergraduate Student Research Assistant Ghosh Lab (2014-Present) Email: tamog@ucsd.edu		Daniel Tang Undergraduate Student Research Assistant, UCSD  (2016-Present)
	Yogitha Chareddy Undergraduate Student Ghosh Lab (2016-Present)		Precious Moman Undergraduate Student, SDSU Student Research Assistant (2016-Present)