Shreya Mukherjee grew up in Mallarpur, a small village in Murshidabad district in West Bengal, and did her bachelor’s and master’s at Visva Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore’s university in Shantiniketan, which is rooted in an alternative pedagogical approach different from most modern-day universities.
The only child of government employees – her father in the education department, her mother a computer teacher, Shreya was surrounded by doctors in her family, from grandparents to uncles, aunts, and cousins. But when she didn’t clear the joint entrance exam, she ended up somewhere unexpected: pursuing biotechnology.
She is now a third-year INSPIRE PhD fellow at IIT Madras’s Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, working in the cardiovascular genetics lab on two research problems that sit in a territory nobody has mapped before.
The Accidental Researcher
Shreya’s mother always pushed her toward both academics and extracurriculars. “I’m a jack of all trades, master of none kind of person,” she laughs, describing her school years where she was known for quirky t-shirts (she’s wearing a periodic table one during our interview) and being, as she proudly declares, “very humorous.”
She was studious then, she insists, much more than now, and feels like her brain has matured with time. Teaching was always the goal. “I wanted to be a professor because I like teaching people about concepts. I love to share knowledge.” But the path wasn’t clear until her master’s, when she wrote a review paper on fibrosis – and had it stolen.
Her seniors took her research, her write-ups, changed a few words here and there, and published without her name. The betrayal stung, but it crystallized something: “I decided I don’t want to publish a review paper. I’ll publish an original article based on my research on fibrosis.”
Then COVID came, and she watched doctors waiting for researchers to provide solutions. That is when she decided she wanted to be the kind of doctor who tells other doctors what they should do.
Two Projects, One Thread
At IIT Madras, working under Professor Nitish Mahapatra, whom she had obsessively researched before joining – stalking the lab, asking what everyone was doing, reading their papers, Shreya juggles two projects connected by a common thread: peptides produced naturally in our bodies.
The first examines catastatin’s role in cholesterol metabolism. Catestatin is a small peptide produced in the body that is known to lower blood pressure, but in certain animals it also raises cholesterol which should not happen. Statins, the standard cholesterol treatment, work but carry side effects for long-term users.
Her second project explores whether pancreatic statin causes ferroptosis (iron-mediated cell death) in diabetes pathogenesis, an entirely unexplored territory. Nobody was exploring from the angle of pancreastatin and ferroptosis. “There’s no literature. I’m starting from scratch,” she explained. That novelty excites and terrifies her. Working without a roadmap means every step requires building the foundation.
For two years the antibodies for the ferroptosis project refused to cooperate while she kept the catestatin work moving. Last year they started working, and now both projects are running simultaneously. She presented her initial findings at the International Society for Heart Research (ISHR) India conference at IIT Madras, and the first time she stood up and spoke about her own work to a room full of researchers who then came to ask her questions. It felt, she says, very good.
The Weight Lab Learning Curve
Coming from a COVID-era master’s program with zero hands-on experience, joining a wet lab was daunting. She had never touched anything, had never held any pipette in her hand. Her professor’s first question: “Why do you want to join my lab when you don’t have any experience?”
She know the theoretical part but wanted to learn the practical part and simply asked her guide for a few months.
The first year was harder than she had expected. She was cautious around the equipment, anxious about making an irreversible mistake, and when early promising results were followed by weeks of nothing, the gap hit harder because of the raised expectations.
Her lab mates, whom she describes as siblings, people she argues with and leans on in equal measure, found her a therapist when she struggled, made her go, and checked on her knee injury, a remnant of the classical dance she had trained in until it stopped her. She does the same for her juniors now, sitting with them through the stretches when nothing works and telling them what she once needed to hear, “It’s okay, keep going.”
The Designer Scientist
But there’s another side to Shreya that makes her unique in the research world: she designs – flyers for biotech events, certificates, even a journal cover page that got selected for publication alongside her professor’s paper.
Word spread at IIT Madras about her design skills. Now she creates visuals for events, contributes to aesthetics alongside science. “I feel good when someone says, ‘You’re good with this, do this for us.’ Although it’s a big responsibility, I feel happy. I can showcase that part of me.”
It’s the jack-of-all-trades spirit—refusing to be confined to just one identity, just one skill set.
The professor she hopes to become
Shreya will finish her PhD, do a postdoc, and then she wants to teach an ambition that predates her knowledge of what research even was. She has already had a taste of it as a teaching assistant to BTech students, where she found she had standards she would not lower and a warmth she could not switch off, a combination that made students simultaneously respect her and find her slightly intimidating.
Beyond the science, the PhD has given her knowledge of what it feels like to be at the edge of your ability with someone standing beside you anyway, and she carries that into how she mentors her own juniors.
A small town girl, Shreya dreams of her own cabin one day with the name ‘Professor Shreya’, being the kind of doctor who asks why things happen, not just treats what already has.
Shreya Mukherjee is a third-year INSPIRE PhD fellow at IIT Madras’s Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, working on the cardiovascular genetics of catestatin and ferroptosis-linked pathways. She holds the INSPIRE fellowship continuously since higher secondary, topped her university at the master’s level, and brings to her research the same restless curiosity she carried out of Shantiniketan.