Our Ipsita Banerjee

Born in Kolkata on 24th October 1992, Ipsita had her early education at St. Johns’ Diocesan school. This was followed by her schooling at Tsukuba, Japan and Munich, Germany for a year. She returned and did her ICSE from Delhi Public School, Newtown and concluded her high school studies at Delhi Public School, Megacity, from where she did her ISC. In both these examinations, she fared extremely well and that too without any private tutors.

She joined St.Xaviers’ college, Kolkata from where she graduated in Microbiology with flying colours. Meanwhile, she did a bachelor’s project on Expression, purification and crystallisation of membrane
protein AcrB from the Structural Biology lab of Prof. Masato Kawasaki at the Institute of High Energy Physics, KEK, Tsukuba, Japan and had the chance to observe certain experiments at their large hadron collider.

She did her M.Sc (Master of Science) from Calcutta University in Biophysics, Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics. She stood first in the University, winning the Gold Medal.

Following this she won a full scholarship internship at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, for a period of two months. Here she worked in the lab of Prof. Deborah Fass and had the unique opportunity of getting acquainted with the Nobel Laureate, Ada Yonath.

Meanwhile, she cleared both the GRE and IELTS tests with excellent grades. She applied at several European universities for a Ph.D. position, especially those where Structural Biology was available as a research subject. She was always very specific about her research priorities and never applied randomly. She got a call from two places. From Marburg University, Germany under the mentorship of Gerhard Klebe and also from Lund University, Sweden under Derek Logan. Using some inputs from Prof. Klebe, Ipsita wrote an extended project on Crystallography. Prof. Klebe was very impressed and wrote a strong letter of recommendation to a funding agency for a scholarship that would support her Ph.D. She was granted funding for an initial period of three months that would be extended on favourable progress. However, based on her impressive CV, she was awarded a full scholarship from the Lawski Foundation that would cover the entire duration for doing her Ph.D at Lund University. She accepted this offer.

In the year 2017, Ipsita landed at Lund and began her Ph.D work under Derek Logan. Initially, she started on conventional approaches to structural biology (Crystallography and SAXS) but did not get encouraging results. Prof. Logan then shifted the methodology to Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo EM) that was providing groundbreaking results in structural biology. Significantly, in 2017, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the scientists who had developed this technique. Ipsita was among the few students selected that year to attend the Nobel lectures in Stockholm. Apart from doing this, she also took a short one-week course on cryo EM at Stockholm University.

Based on this miniscule course and another similar one at Umea University, Ipsita started her journey into the amazing land of cryo EM. It was extremely difficult since her mentor had `more enthusiasm than expertise’ while other members of the department knew almost nothing about it. At successive Ph.D committee meetings, she had virtually nothing to report and felt sad, dejected and even humiliated to a certain extent. It appeared a losing battle when, on one of her trips to Stockholm for carrying out experiments, she had an inspirational flash. As she told later to her mother she was able to visualise the pictures in her mind and became convinced that her destiny lay in cryo EM.

Her Research Doc

Her Research Papers

Back at Lund, she pounced with full energy on her problems. Meanwhile, the dark shadows of Covid 19 had engulfed the planet. When all were confined to their rooms Ipsita regularly visited her lab. Left alone, she put in an extraordinary effort and finally made the breakthrough. She had collared cryo EM, knowing the precise manner of processing the data to get wonderful results. Her achievements literally stunned her mentors. Later on, they would go on to say `You were a pioneer’, ` the way you learned cryo EM was an inspiration, `you made seminal contributions ‘ , `Because of your hard work, we are where we are today’ and so on. The reader may look at some of these transcripts. Her seminars were widely appreciated and she also won a poster prize at a conference that included various Nordic countries.

The superhuman effort broke her health from which she could not recover. She returned home, was diagnosed with SLE (Lupus), and passed away in Kolkata on 7th December 2022, the same month she was expected to defend her thesis. Meanwhile, she was offered a post-doc position at Leeds University (Aston Medical School), few months earlier.

After her death, her collaborative research papers are slowly appearing. Besides her academics, she had two pastimes, reading and origami. A voracious reader, her favourite authors were mostly British. Her repertoire was mind-boggling. From Enid Blyton to Emile Bronte to Arthur Conan Doyle to James Joyce, she had read them all. Shakespeare remained her perennial favourite and she could recite, scene by scene and act by act, many of his plays.

Ipsita loved travelling, but very selectively. Natural beauty at its grandest expanse (mountains, valleys, gorges...), she admired. Her all-time favourite was the Himalayas-the abode of snow. She even used these pictures in her seminars. This is a good enough reason for including so many Himalayan pictures here.

She had learnt both origami and the Japanese language during her schooling in Japan. She remembered and loved both till the end. She was literally a master of origami-the slowly vanishing art of paper folding invented by the Japanese. She had the ability to create origami figures with multiple twists and turns. Initially devoted to making natural objects like flowers, birds, plants etc., she later used to make figures depicting structures of viruses, proteins etc. which were her topics of research. She gifted them almost regularly to her teachers, some of whom used them in their lectures and seminars.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
(Ipsita's favourite lines)