By Dr Anupam Sengupta
ATTRACT Fellow, PI, and Tenure Track Professor, University of Luxembourg
Prof. Dr. Anupam Sengupta is an ATTRACT Fellow and tenure track Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Luxembourg. Anupam directs the Physics of Living Matter Group, a team of cross-disciplinary scientists working on emergent functionalities in biological systems, with a specific focus on climate change and human health. Research in the Sengupta Lab spans soft and living matter physics, microfluidics, microbiology and genetic engineering. Anupam holds a B.S. and M.S degree (Dual Degree) in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay, India, and a Ph.D. in Soft Matter Physics (2013). For his doctoral thesis on Liquid Crystal Microfluidics, carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization, Göttingen, Germany, Anupam was awarded the Glenn H. Brown Prize from the International Liquid Crystal Society (2014), the Springer Award for Outstanding Thesis and the Berliner-Ungewitter Prize (both in 2013). From 2014 to 2018, Anupam was a Human Frontiers Cross-Disciplinary Fellow at MIT (Cambridge, USA) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland), where pioneered discoveries in rapid microbial adaptation to changing environments (Nature ’17, Phys. Rev. X ’18, PNAS ’21).
Alongside research, he is an enthusiastic educator, and serves as the Program Director for the Bachelor of Physics Program at the University of Luxembourg. Prof. Sengupta routinely organizes international conferences at the interface of physics and biology, and serves as a Referee for top-tier international peer reviewed journals, among others Nature Physics, Nature Communications, Nature Biofilms and Microbiomes, Science Advances, PNAS, Physical Review Letters and Advanced Materials. In 2015, Anupam was selected as a “promising young scientists for future” by Nature during the 65th Lindau Meeting for Nobel Laureates; more recently, he was invited to speak at the global Climate Change Countdown TEDX event where he underscored the role of biophysics in solving key global and medical challenges that the humanity faces today.