Born on 1 April 1954 in the Indian state of West Bengal, Siddhartha Roy completed his schooling from Ballygunge Government High School and then obtained an honours degree in chemistry from Presidency College, Calcutta in 1974 and did his doctoral studies at the University of Delaware under the guidance of Prof. Roberta F. Colman to secure a PhD in 1981. His post-doctoral studies were at Brandeis University at the laboratory of Prof. Alfred Redfield and at the National Institutes of Health. Returning to India in 1986, he joined Bose Institute, Kolkata as a Senior Lecturer in the department of Biophysics. He served the Institute till 2004 holding positions of Reader and then Professor of Biophysics when he moved to the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology as its Director. After completing 10 years as the Director of IICB, he returned to Bose Institute in 2014 as a Senior Professor and Dean of studies. While at IICB, he has served the nation in several different high level capacities such as the Founder-Director-in-charge of the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Kolkata , the Cluster Director of 11 Biological institutes of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research , member of the Governing Body of the CSIR and as a Visiting Professor at Osaka University. He has served as the President of the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology. He is the Founder-President of the Chemical Biology Society of India. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chemical Biology Society. He also served as the Director of Bose Institute during the critical Centenary year.
Legacy
Roy's researches during his stint in the US was on protein folding and nuclear magnetic resonance studies of DNA and those researches identified the first hydropathy model which helped in predicting the exteriors and interiors of proteins by analyzing sequence information. He is also reported to have performed the complete assignment of a nucleic acid imino proton spectra using Nuclear Overhauser effect, regio-specific isotope labeling of sugars in nucleic acids and working along with Ad Bax and R. H. Griffey, developed an indirect 2D-NMR detection method, all reported to be for the first time. Later focusing his attention on bacteriophage lambda, he studied the gene expression of the bacterial virus using its operator-repressor system. Through his collaborative work with Sankar Adhya in 1998, he elucidated the role of differential contact in the transcription regulation mechanism and demonstrated the theory in many genetic regulatory circuits. His current work is focused on peptidetherapeutics and he holds patents for some of his work. Roy has published his research work through a number of articles published in peer-reviewed journals and ResearchGate, an online repository of scientific papers, has listed 155 of them. He is a joint editor of Subcellular Biochemistry, volume on Proteins: Structure, Function, and Engineering published by Plenum Press, New York, USA. He has guided around 30 scholars in their doctoral studies. When the Chemical Biology Society of India was formed in 2013, he became its founder president and holds the position. He is a former president of the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology and is its incumbent vice president.
