Sankar Adhya (born 4 October 1937) is a molecular biologist and geneticist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI)[1] and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He has made important contributions regarding the physical basis of transcriptional regulation in bacteria, the lysis/lysogeny switch in lambda phage, the organization of the bacterial nucleoid, and phage therapy.

Adhya was born in Kolkata, India and studied chemistry at the University of Calcutta as an undergraduate.

Following postdoctoral training at Stanford University, the Bose Institute, and the University of Rochester, he joined the NCI's newly formed Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in 1971.

[3][4] He has remained at the NIH since 1971 and is presently Head of the LMB's Developmental Genetics section.