Profile
Dr. Rituparna De joined ICMR-NIRBI as DHR NRI (Scientist C
and PI) in 2018 on being awarded the DHR NRI grant by the
Department of Health
Research, MoHFW, GoI and is heading her research in
Metagenomics and AMR. She has 19 years of research
experience in the field of Molecular Epidemiology of
Infectious Diseases and chronic Diseases. She is a doctoral
alumna of NIRBI (then NICED) and was guided for PhD on the
Molecular Epidemiology of Vibrio cholerae by Dr. G.B. Nair.
She has carried out her postdoctoral research at the Ohio
State University, USA and Umea University, Sweden from
2012-2018 and worked on miRNAs in cancer, MRSA AMR, Celiac
Disease microbiome and PDAC microbiome research. She has
previously worked as Microbiologist under WHO at the
National Polio Laboratory. Dr. De has obtained short-term
pre- and postdoctoral training at ICDDR,B, Dhaka, Karolinska
Institute, Sweden and was selected as visiting researcher
and collaborator at the European Bioinformatics Institute
(EMBL-EBI), Cambridge, UK in 2019.
Her research contributions include the identification of the
first WPV 3 strain during the resurgence in 2007 in Kolkata,
the circulation of the Haitian Vibrio cholerae genotype in
2007-2008 after their discovery by Kumar et al., the
carriage of Vibrio cholerae in non-cholera diarrheal stool,
characterization of the diarrheal microbiome, identification
and characterization of probiotic strains and was the first
to identify the key transcriptional factor responsible for
the chronic inflammation in Celiac Disease and the role of
the microbiome as the epigenetic regulator. She was the
first to use Human Organoids in CD which changed the
landscape of CD research. She was selected as Top 20 Young
Investigators at the 14th Probiotic Symposium, Trivandrum,
India, by the Gut Microbiota and Probiotic Science
Foundation, India. She was nominated as member of the Expert
Group of ICMR’s Gut Microbiome Initiative in 2024. She has
multiple publications in esteemed journals, book chapters
and served as guest editor. Her research interests are in
microbial evolution and ecology.