Partho Ghosh

Partho Ghosh, Ph.D., is Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. He received his BS in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University, where he carried out research with Dr. Peter Moore on the structure and dynamics of the 5S ribosomal RNA. Dr. Ghosh then moved to the University of California, San Francisco to carry out doctoral research with Dr. Robert Stroud, and worked on the X-ray crystallographic structure and mechanism of action of ion channels and pore-forming toxins. After graduate school, Dr. Ghosh moved to Harvard University to carry out postdoctoral research on the structural biology of the immune response with the late Dr. Don Wiley. 

Dr. Ghosh started his own laboratory as an independent investigator at the University of California, San Diego in 1997. He and his group are studying how molecular interactions between microbial pathogens and hosts lead to infectious disease, with a particular interest in bacterial pathogens. To find ways to intervene against such diseases, the Ghosh lab is investigating how pathogen proteins interact with their human targets using a combination of structural biology (i.e., X-ray crystallography, NMR, and cryo-electron microscopy), biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, cell biology, and reverse genetics. The Ghosh lab is focusing its current efforts on group A Streptococcus, diversity-generating retroelements, and Enterococcus. Research in the Ghosh lab has been supported by the W.M. Keck Distinguished Young Scholars in Medicine Award, the American Heart Association, the Burroughs-Wellcome New Initiatives in Malaria Award, and the National Institutes of Health among others. Dr. Ghosh is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Microbiology.