Partho Ghosh, Ph.D., is Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He received his BS in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University, where he carried out research with Dr. Peter Moore on the structure and dynamics of 5S ribosomal RNA. Dr. Ghosh then moved to the University of California, San Francisco, where he carried out doctoral research with Dr. Robert Stroud and worked on the X-ray crystallographic structure and mechanism of action of ion channels and pore-forming toxins. After graduate school, Dr. Ghosh carried out postdoctoral research at Harvard University with the late Dr. Don Wiley on the structural biology of the immune response.

In his independent laboratory at UCSD, started in 1997, he and his group have been studying how molecular interactions between microbial pathogens and their hosts promote infectious disease. In particular, the Ghosh lab has been investigating how proteins of bacterial pathogens interact with their mammalian targets using a combination of structural biology (i.e., X-ray crystallography, SAXS, NMR, and cryo-electron microscopy), biochemistry, microbiology, cell biology, and reverse genetics. The Ghosh lab currently focuses its research efforts on Streptococcus pyogenes (Strep A), a major cause of global morbidity and mortality, as well as diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs), which are responsible for the highest level of protein sequence variation in the natural world. Variation in DGR proteins enable ecologically diverse microbes, including those found in the microbiome, to adapt to dynamic environments.