Mahak Sharma

Mahak Sharma is an Associate Professor and DBT/Wellcome Trust India alliance Senior Fellow at the Department of Biological Sciences, IISER Mohali. She received her Ph.D. training under the mentorship of Drs. Steve Caplan and Naava Naslavasky at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha (USA) where she worked on mechanisms regulating receptor recycling. She then did her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Michael B. Brenner at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston (USA) studying trafficking of lipid antigen-presenting CD1 proteins in immune cells. In 2011, Mahak moved back to India, to set up her independent laboratory at Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER)-Mohali. Her research interests are focused on studying the molecular mechanisms regulating membrane transport towards lysosomes and lysosome positioning as well as how intracellular pathogens manipulate the host endolysosomal pathway for their growth and survival.
Mahak was awarded with the highly competitive DBT-Wellcome Trust (UK) India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship and later Senior Fellowship from the same agency. For her contribution to Indian Science, she was awarded the BM Birla Science Prize in Biology (2020), DBT-National Women Bio-scientist Award (2019), NASI-Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award (2018), INSA Medal for Young Scientist (2018), SERB Women Excellence Award (2017) and was elected as a “member of the Indian National Young Academy of Science (2018) and Young Associate Member” of the Indian Academy of Sciences (2015). She has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Cell Science, Traffic and on the early career advisory board of Journal of Cell Biology. She has also served and as a reviewing editor at eLife. Her profile has been featured in Journal of Cell Biology “People & Ideas” and Journal of Cell Science “Cell Scientist to watch” columns.