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DR. PANKAJ BARAH (ড¡ পংকজ বৰা) Assistant Professor MBBT, Tezpur University Tezpur - 784 028, Assam,
India Contact: Phone: +91-7086891103 Emails: barah[at]tezu.ernet.in barah.pankaj[at]gmail.com
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Dr. Pankaj Barah is a systems biologist, with 10+ years of
experiences in multidisciplinary, multinational, and multicultural
environment. His main area of interest is big data analytics in biology and
medicine. He has expertise in high throughput data generation, storage,
analysis, and integration. He uses mathematical and computational methods for
predictive modelling of complex biological systems
using the heterogeneous data. He also has complementary training and hands on
experiences in experimental high-throughput methods such as- microarray,
next-generation sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics, gene silencing using RNAi, yeast-two hybrid, genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9
etc. |
Academic Profile:
PhD in Computational Systems Biology (2012), Norwegian University of Science
and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
M.Sc. in Bioinformatics (2006), University of Madras,
India, First Class.
B.Sc. (Hons.) in Biology (2003), Gauhati University, India, First class with University
Rank, Distinction.
Positions held:
Current: Assistant Professor,
Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (MBBT), Tezpur University,
since May 2017.
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2015 -2017 |
Bioinformatics
scientist, Computational Oncology Group, Division of
Theoretical Bioinformatics -eilsLabs, German Cancer
Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany. Projects: International
Cancer Gnome Consortium (ICGC), and Emed - SYS-GLIO (Systems‐based predictors for the biological
and clinical behavior of gliomas). |
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2013-2015 |
Post-doctoral
Fellow at the Cell, Molecular Biology and Genomics Group, Norwegian
University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Project: Damage
associated molecular patterns in plant innate immunity (DAMP). |
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2015 Jan-Apr |
Short-term
Visiting Fellow (3 months) at the Comparative & Integrative Genomics
Lab, Department of Plant Systems Biology, University of Ghent, Belgium. Host: Prof. Klaas Vandepoele. |
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2009-2013 |
PhD Fellow at the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Aug 2009- Feb 2013 Thesis Title: Integrative
Systems Approaches to Study Plant Stress Responses. Supervisors: Prof. Atle M Bones, Prof. Martin Kuiper, and Dr. Per winge. |
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2010-2011 |
Visiting PhD
Fellow (6 months) at the Centre for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department
of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Copenhagen,
2010-2011. Hosts: Prof.
John Mundy, Prof. H. B. Nielsen
and Prof. S¿ren Brunak, (ERANET
Plant Genomics project). |
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2007-2009 |
Senior
Research Fellow (CSIR) at the Mathematical Modelling
and Computational Biology Group, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology
(CCMB), Hyderabad, India, 2007-2009. Supervisor: Prof. Somdatta Sinha. |
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2006-2007 |
Junior
Research Fellow (DBT/COE) ,
Bioinformatics Centre, University of Pune, (2006-2007). Supervisor: Prof.
Indira Ghosh. |
Honors/Awards:
International:
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1 |
Short-Term
Scientific Missions fellowship from - COST (European Cooperation in Science
and Technology) to visit Comparative & Integrative Genomics Lab, Department
of Plant Systems Biology, University of Ghent, Belgium (Feb 2015-Apr). |
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2 |
Travel
grant (invited) to attend the first WG2 meeting of COST (European Cooperation in
Science and Technology) action FA1306 in Carcavelos,
Portugal. |
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3 |
Invited
travel grant to attend and present research work at COST SUSTAIN workshop on
cellular dynamics of effector action and recognition, held in Tel Aviv,
Israel, 2015. |
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4 |
Full
sponsorship award to attend OpenPlant ERASynBio 2nd Summer School: Introduction to Synthetic
Biology in plant systems - John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK: September 2014. Orgainsed by Jhon Innes centre, BBSRC and University of Cambridge. |
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5 |
Young
scientist award to present an oral
talk and a poster during ÔAdvanced Lecture Course on Systems BiologyÕ
(SysBio2014) sponsored by SystemsX.ch, BMBF and ERASysAPP,
2014, Innsbruck, Austria. |
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6 |
Travel
fellowship (USD 3000) from www.unifor.no to present paper in the The 12th International Conference on Bioinformatics &
Computational Biology held in Las Vegas, USA, July 2012. |
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7 |
Travel
fellowship from COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), to
present paper in the Fourth StatSeq workshop
"Statistical Challenges of the 1000Û genome sequences in plants", held
in Italy, 2012. |
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8 |
Travel
fellowship from SPPS - Scandinavian Plant Physiology Society to present
research as an oral talk in XXIV SPPS Congress, Stavanger, Norway, 2011. |
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9 |
Travel
fellowship from Faculty of Natural Science and Technology, Norwegian
University of Science and Technology to present paper in the 10th
International Conference in Systems Biology held in Heidelberg, Germany,
2011. |
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10 |
Genesys Young Scientists Runners up award and Poster Award during International Conference on Systems Biology,
held in Edinburgh (UK),Oct,2010.(Selected out of
>900 posters from 67 countries). |
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11 |
Full
fellowship from Welcome Trust (UK) to attend 10 days long Welcome Trust
Advance Course "Functional Genomics to Systems Biology", held at
Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK. 2010. |
National
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1 |
CSIR
Senior Research Fellowship, under Trans Disciplinary Research area, 2009. |
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2 |
Junior
Research Fellowship, Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India, 2007. |
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3 |
Summer
Research Fellowship, by National Centre for Biological Sciences Bangalore,
India in 2005. |
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4 |
Child
scientists award 1995, National Council for Science & Technology Communication
(NCSTC), India. |
Research
Publications:
Dr. Barah in Google Scholar
Dr. Barah in PubMed
Research paper, review
and short articles in peer reviewed journals:
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1 |
Pankaj
Barah, Mahantesha Naika B N, Naresh Doni Jayavelu, Ramanathan Sowdhamini, Khader Shameer, and Atle M Bones; Transcriptional
regulatory networks in Arabidopsis thaliana during single and combined
stresses. Nucleic Acids Res. 2016 Apr 20;44(7):3147-64. |
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2 |
Pankaj Barah
and Atle M Bones;
Multi-dimensional approaches for studying plant defence
against insects: from ecology to omics and
synthetic biology. Journal of Exp. Bot., 2015 Feb;66(2):479-493. |
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3 |
Pankaj Barah
and Kaveri Bhuyan; India: Endangered species damned by dams. Nature
515, 37 (06 November 2014) (Correspondence) |
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4 |
Pankaj Barah et al;
Genome scale transcriptional response diversity among ten ecotypes of Arabidopsis
thaliana during heat stress.
Front. in Plant Sci. 2013 Dec 26;4:532. |
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5 |
Pankaj Barah, Naresh Doni Jayavelu
et al., Genome Scale Cold Response Regulatory Networks in ten Arabidopsis
thaliana Ecotypes. BMC Genomics, 2013 Oct 22;14(1):722 (*Highly accessed) |
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6 |
Simon Rasmussen, Pankaj
Barah et al; Transcriptome response to
combinations of stresses in Arabidopsis thaliana. Plant Physiol, 2013 Feb, 161: 1783-1794. (*Top ten most
read, Citations>150). |
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7 |
Pankaj
Barah, Per Winge, Anna Kusnierczyk , Diem Hong
Tran and Atle M Bones; Molecular signatures of
specific and common defense responses in Arabidopsis thaliana during an
insect feeding and a bacterial infection. PLoS
One, 2013;8(3):e58987. |
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8 |
Sankaran Sandhya, Saane Sudha Rani, Barah Pankaj, Madabosse
Kande Govind, Bernard Offman, Narayanaswamy Srinivasan and Ramanathan Sowdhamini; Length variations amongst protein domain superfamilies and consequences on structure and function.
PLoS One, 2009;4(3):e4981. |
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9 |
Sandhya. S, Pankaj
B, M. K. Govind, B. Offman,
N. Srinivasan,and R. Sowdhamini; CUSP: an algorithm to distinguish
structurally conserved and unconserved regions in
protein domain alignments and its
application in the study of large length variations. BMC Structural
Biology, 2008, 8:28. |
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10 |
Pankaj Barah and Somdatta Sinha ; Analysis of Protein Folds Using Protein Contacts
Networks. PRAMANA: Journal of Physics, August 2008, Vol. 71, (No.2). |
Book chapters:
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1 |
Jens Rohloff,
Pankaj Barah, and Atle M. Bones, Improving
crop productivity and abiotic stress tolerance in cultivated Fragaria using omics and
systems biology approach. , in ÒImproving Crop
Productivity in Sustainable AgricultureÓ, pp 451-480,
Wiley-VCH Germany, ISBN: 978-3-527-33242-7, 2012. |
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2 |
Konika Chawla*, Pankaj Barah*, Martin Kuiper, and Atle M. Bones; "Systems
Biology: a promising tool to study abiotic stress responsesÓ in "Omics and Plant Abiotic Stress Tolerance", Bentham
Publishers, USA (ISBN: No.: 978-1-60805-058-1). * Equal contribution |
Conference
proceedings/abstracts:
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1 |
Pankaj Barah, Simon Rasmusse et al., Arabidopsis global stress regulon, Proc. of XXIV SPPS Congress, Stavanger, Norway
2011. |
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2 |
Pankaj Barah, Simon Rasmussen et
al., Transcriptional
regulatory networks in response to single and combined stresses in plants, Proc. of Int.
Conf. on Systems Biology 2011, Heidelberg, Germany. |
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3 |
Pankaj
Barah, Anna Kusnierczyk , Diem Hong Tran, Per Winge, Atle M Bones, ÒSystems biology of host defense in
Arabidopsis thaliana during insect and bacterial attack.Ó, Proc. of Int.
Conf. on Systems Biology 2010, Edinburgh , Scotland. |
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4 |
Pankaj Barah and Somdatta Sinha, Studying Protein
Folds using Networks, Proceeding of National Conference on Molecular Biophysics, India,
January 2009. |
Talks, posters, conferences,
workshops, trainings:
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2017 |
Resource person,
for 2 days Bioinformatics training cum workshop, at CSIR-North East Institute
of Science and Technology (NEIST), Jorhat, Assam. |
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2017 |
Attended
symposium ÔAdvancement of second generation sequencing technology for health
researchÕ at Regional Medical Research Centre, NE Region – ICMR, Dibrugarh, Assam. |
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2016 |
Attended the
international symposium ÔBioinformatics for Human Health and DiseaseÕ
hosted by the Heidelberg Center for Human Bioinformatics and took place at the
German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. |
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2016 |
Talk at the DKFZ
PostDoc Network annual retreat, Neustadt, Germany. |
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2015 |
Attended the
symposium ÔInnovations in oncologyÕ, National Center for Tumor
Diseases, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany. |
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2016 |
Biotech
Entrepreneurship Training Program, summer sem., Heidelberg
University, Germany. |
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2015 |
Talk at the
annual retreat of Molecular Systems Biology Group, Norwegian University of Science
and Technology, Norway. |
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2015 |
A talk at
the department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Tezpur University,
India. |
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2015 |
An invited
talk at the department Biotechnology, CSIR-NEIST, Jorhat,
India. |
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2014 |
OpenPlant ERASynBio 2nd Summer
School: Introduction to Synthetic Biology in plant systems at the John
Innes Centre, Norwich, UK. |
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2014 |
Presented an
invited talk during Norwegian Bioinformatics Forum meeting,
Trondheim. |
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2014 |
Indo-Norwegian
joint workshop on academic collaboration, held in New Delhi. |
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2014 |
Presented an
oral talk and a poster during Advanced Lecture Course on Systems Biology
(SysBio2014) sponsored by SystemsX.ch, BMBF and ERASysAPP,
Innsbruck, Austria. |
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2013 |
Presented an
invited talk at STATSEQ meeting on Gene Network Inference with systems
genetic data and beyond, held in Paris. |
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2012 |
Presented a
talk in the Norwegian Bioinformatics Forum meeting, Trondheim, Norway. |
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2012 |
Presented a
talk in the 12th International Conference on Bioinformatics &
Computational Biology held in Las Vegas, USA. |
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2012 |
Presented
poster and short talk in 4th StatSeq workshop
"Statistical Challenges of the 1000Û genome sequences in plants",
held in Italy. |
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2012 |
Presented an
invited talk in 10th Norwegian Arabidopsis Meeting, Norway. |
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2011 |
Presented an
invited talk in XXIV SPPS Congress, Stavanger, Norway. |
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2011 |
Presented
poster in International Conf. on Systems Biology, Heidelberg, Germany. |
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2010 |
Presented
poster in International Conf. on Systems Biology, Edinburgh (UK) |
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2010 |
Participated
in the advance course on Functional Genomics and Systems Biology, held
at Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge. |
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2009 |
Presented
poster in National Symposium on Cellular and Molecular Biophysics (NCMB),
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India. |
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2008 |
Presented a
poster in International Workshop and Conference on: Statistical Physics
Approaches to Multi disciplinary Problems, Indian IIT, Guwahati,
India. |
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2007 |
Attended, International
Workshop on Physics in Biology, University of Hyderabad, India. |
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2007 |
Attended 11th
ADNAT symposium on Structural Biology and Structure Prediction at CCMB
Hyderabad, India. |
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2005 |
Presented
paper on ÔPharmacogenomicsÕ in a conference organized by Association of
Biological Chemist and Dept. of Biochemistry University of Madras,
India. |
Currently Teaching:
1) BI 426: Evolutionary genomics
(2) BI 325: Analytical Techniques
Research Interest:
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Evolutionary genomics: |
How do differentially evolved regulatory interactions facilitate
phenotypic variation, environmental adaption and genome evolution in living
systems? During his PhD and first postdoctoral period, Dr. Barah has worked
to decipher the role of cis-regulatory evolution towards climate adaptation in
phenotypically diverged plant populations using network biology approach. |
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Systems biology: |
Dr. Barah has expertise in carrying out integrative analysis of
large-scale genome-wide data to study evolutionary dynamics of biological
systems from molecular level to population level. |
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Big-data in Biology: |
He has been developing robust, user-friendly computational methods to
integrate, visualize and analysis of heterogeneous high throughput biological
data. |
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Structural systems biology: |
To understand protein functions in complex structural systems in the level
of intra-molecular and inter-molecular (protein-protein, protein-ligand,
protein-DNA) interactions. Genome and proteome scale analysis to find the
effects of mutations on protein structure and function. |
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Systems medicine: |
During his period at DKFZ, Heidelberg, Dr. Barah has studied the
genetic characteristics of malignant brain tumors of different WHO grades, to
develop personalized treatment strategies for preventing drug resistance. His
task was ÔIntegrative analysis of genome-wide data setsÕ. |
Research group:
Coming soonÉ
Interested students, please send your CV by email.
Research projects:
1. Integrative systems biology approach to study climate adaptation and
genome evolution in plants
Journal assignments:
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v Guest associate editor: Frontiers in Plant Science. v Reviewer for: BMC Genomics, PLOS One, Advances in
Bioinformatics, Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, Nucleic Acids Research, Computational
Biology and Chemistry (Elsevier). |
© Pankaj Barah
LAST UPDATED: 15th July, 2017