Ayush Pal

PhD Student

Ayush Pal

Office Y13-K-36

Phone (office): +41 44 635 31 88

Phone (lab): +41 44 635 44 39

Ayush was born in Kolkata, but spent most of his time living around India, primarily in New Delhi and Mumbai.

He received his Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences at The Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai and completed his Master’s in Bioengineering at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. At Penn, he worked under the tutelage of Dr. Lukasz Bugaj to study the applications of optogenetic clustering approaches to target cancer cell signaling and survival. After his Master’s, he continued working as a research specialist in the Bugaj Lab where he worked on developing synthetic protein circuits to target SARS-CoV-2 protein aggregation. Furthermore, he worked on developing a new class of optogenetic signaling probes, including the ErbB family of receptor tyrosine kinases, by harnessing the ability of the BcLOV4 photoreceptor to simultaneously cluster and translocate to the cell membrane upon light stimulation.

In September 2023, he started at the Life Science Zurich Graduate School as a PhD student in Francesca Peri’s group at the University of Zurich.

In his free time, he loves cooking, visiting breweries, going out for runs, consuming copious amounts of ramen, listening to indie/psychedelic/experimental rock music and spending time with his friends and family.

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6581-9592
LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/in/ayushadityapal

A.A. Pal#, W. Benman#, T.R. Mumford, Z. Huang, B.Y. Chow, L.J. Bugaj, Optogenetic clustering and membrane translocation of the BcLOV4 photoreceptor, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 120 (2023) e2221615120. http://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221615120

T.R. Mumford, D. Rae, A. Idris, D. Gonzalez-Martinez, A.A. Pal, L.J. Bugaj, Visual detection of submicroscopic protein clusters with a phase-separation-based fluorescent reporter, bioRxiv. (2022) 2022.07.13.499962. http://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.13.499962