Principal Investigator
Dr. Shamik Sen
Dr. Sen joined IIT Bombay in July 2010 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering. Dr. Sen earned a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering (1999) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and an M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering (2002) from IIT Kanpur. He then moved on to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (2007) in the lab of Prof. Dennis Discher. During his Ph.D., he and his co-workers demonstrated for the first time the broad influence of stiffness or rigidity on muscle and stem cell differentiation. Before joining IIT Bombay, he completed postdoctoral training at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), University of California, Berkeley, in the lab of Prof. Sanjay Kumar. There, he focused on understanding the contributions of the actin crosslinking protein, a-actinin, to the motility and invasiveness of brain tumor cells.
Lab Members
Post- Docs
Dr. Preethy Amruthavarshini R
PhD, Tissue Engineering, SASTRA Deemed University, Tamil Nadu, 2025
Date of Joining: January, 2026
Project Area: Microfluidic Device Modelling for Breast Cancer Metastasis
Dr. Kumari Neelam Verma
PhD, Mechanical Engineering, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, 2024
Date of Joining: February, 2025
Project Area: Computational and mathematical modelling of cancer biology, Heat Transfer and fluid mechanics simulation, CFD
Dr. Syed M.S. Abidi
PhD, CSIR-IHBT, Palampur, 2022
PhDs
Vignesh Ganesan
M.Tech.(2018) in Chemical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Joined: January 2019
Project area: Tissue adhesives for wound healing
Yash Deshpande
M. Sc. (2019) in Biotechnology
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi
Joined: January 2020
Project area: Cancer glycobiology & tumor microenvironment
Swetlana Ghosh
M. Sc. (2021) in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Pondicherry University, Pondicherry
Joined: January 2022
Project area: MMP9/CD44 crosstalk in cancer invasion
Sumon Saha
M. Sc. (2019) in Zoology
University of Calcutta, Kolkata
Joined: January 2022
Project area: MMP mediated differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in cancer & their roles in cancer metastasis
Gautam Kannan
M. Sc. (2022) in Biotechnology
Banaras Hindu University
Joined: January 2023
Project area: Role of Amyloid-Collagen interaction in Diabetes Mellitus
Nikita Sharma
M.Tech (2023) in Biotechnology
MNNIT-Allahabad
Joined: July 2023
Project area: Localization-dependent proteolytic and non-proteolytic function of MMPs in Cancer
Anisha Karmakar
M.Tech (2023) in Biomedical Engineering
NIT Rourkela
Joined: July 2023
Project area: Computational modelling of tumor heterogeneity
Fenil Parmar
Parul Garg
Master Students
Shalini Sharma
B.Tech in Biotechnology
Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala
Joined: June 2025
Project area: Computational Modelling of Cancer Invasion
Pijush Kanti Biswas
B.Sc in Zoology
Jagiroad College, Gauhati University, Assam
Joined: July 2025
Project area: MMPs in chromatin remodeling: computation and experiment