[8] Santanu Bhattacharya, born on 23 April 1958 in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in the Indian state of West Bengal, graduated in Chemistry (B.Sc.

[3] Moving to the US, he enrolled for his doctoral studies on bioorganic chemistry at the laboratory of Professor Robert A. Moss of the Rutgers University – New Brunswick and after securing a PhD in 1988, he had a post-doctoral stint with Professor Har Gobind Khorana, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the theme of his studies being signal transduction of membrane proteins.

[11] He also serves as an honorary professor of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research at its Chemical Biology unit.

On 19 April 2023, Professor Bhattacharya joined as the Director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Tirupati (IISER-Tirupati).

Focusing his researches at the interfaces of chemistry, biology, materials science and nanotechnology, Bhattacharya is reported to have made notable contributions in the design and synthesis of lipids, gene delivery vehicles, soft matter, molecular bioanalytic sensors, unnatural amino acids and oligopeptides, G-quadruplex and Duplex-DNA binding small molecules as putative therapeutics, and other biologically active natural product mimics.