Pritha Dasgupta, our 1st Tricia Cohen Prize Student
Pritha is now in the 4th and final year of her studentship in the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, where she has been working in Yogesh Kulathu’s research team since 2022. Her project focuses on understanding the principles of substrate processing by the AAA-ATPase VCP/p97. Pritha’s research aims to uncover how p97 functions together with its many cofactors and adaptor proteins to recognise, unfold, and remodel damaged or misfolded proteins within cells to ensure cellular protein quality control. Understanding these fundamental principles could have far-reaching implications for neurodegenerative diseases in which p97 function is disrupted, potentially opening-up exciting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. Pritha has attended two conferences during her studentship. In 2023 she attended a meeting of The Biochemical Society entitled “Deubiquitylases and Ubl proteases” and in 2024 a European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) conference entitled “Ubiquitin and Ubiquitin-like proteins in health and disease”, where she presented a poster entitled ‘ Investigating the role of ATXN3’s debranching function in the VCP/p97-mediated unfolding of branched chain-modified substrates.” In 2026 Pritha submitted her first research paper for publication entitled “FAF1 and FAF2 enhance human p97-UFD1-NPL4 complex unfoldase activity enabling rational design of p97 activators”. She has also filed a patent to protect the key findings in this paper.
About Pritha Dasgupta
Pritha was raised in Kolkata, India where she received a B.Sc. in Microbiology from St Xavier’s College, Kolkata. Pritha then moved to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, from which she obtained an M.Sc. in Biotechnology . Pritha was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship after ranking in the top 0.1% of the students who took the All India CSIR-UGC Life Sciences examination, and was also ranked in the top 0.1% of the 6,500 applicants who took IIT Mumbai’s entrance examination to their M.Sc programme in Biotechnology. Pritha also carried out a research project at the National Center for Biological Sciences TIFR, Bangalore, India, before taking up her studentship at Dundee.
Below is a photo of Pritha making a presentation to the Trustees and Scientific Advisory Board of the Tricia Cohen Memorial Trust.
Pritha was featured in The Bridge, the University of Dundee Alumni magazine. A link and pdf download is available below:
https://www.dundee.ac.uk/stories/lab-designed-love
