Sourav Ghosh (left) and Kotaro Tomuro
MIT Koch Institute
August 12, 2025
Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Angelika Amon Young Scientist Award: Sourav Ghosh of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and Kotaro Tomuro of RIKEN and The University of Tokyo.
Established in 2021, the prize recognizes graduate students in the life sciences or biomedical research from institutions outside the United States who embody Dr. Amon’s infectious enthusiasm for discovery science.
Sourav Ghosh, a PhD student in Biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay under the supervision of Anirban Banerjee, investigates cell-autonomous immunity—the ability of host cells to defend themselves against intracellular pathogens. His work uncovered a unique bacteriolytic role for VCP/p97, a host AAA-ATPase or enzyme that uses mechanical force to extract ubiquitinated proteins from bacterial surfaces, rupturing the pathogens and releasing their contents. This process protects the host from lethal sepsis and reveals VCP/p97 as a broad-spectrum defense effector. Ghosh’s findings, published in Nature Microbiology, open new avenues for therapeutic interventions against bacterial infections.
Kotaro Tomuro, a PhD candidate at the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute and the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences at the University of Tokyo, works under the supervision of Shintaro Iwasaki. Tomuro develops cutting-edge ribosome profiling methods to investigate the spatial and temporal regulation of translation—the process by which genetic information is converted into proteins. His innovations include “Ribo-Calibration,” an approach that enables absolute quantification of translation rates, and “APEX-Ribo-Seq,” which profiles protein synthesis within specific cellular compartments. Together, these tools have generated a detailed atlas of where and when proteins are made in the cell, revealing new principles of gene expression with potential applications in neurobiology, cancer research, and RNA-based therapeutics.
Ghosh and Tomuro will present their research at the Amon Award ceremony on Thursday, November 6, at 10 a.m. in the Luria Auditorium, followed by an 11:30 a.m. reception in the Koch Institute Public Galleries.
The MIT community and Amon Lab alumni are invited to attend.