Deepak Kaushal, Ph.D.
NEW DIRECTOR OF THE SNPRC
D
eepak Kaushal, Ph.D., is a Professor at Texas Biomedical Research Institute and the new Director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC). He oversees the SNPRC operations, a more than $40 million National Institutes of Health-funded national resource for primate research. Dr. Kaushal is also one of the top most-funded researchers by the NIH in the United States. His research focuses on tuberculosis (TB), a disease that claims two million lives a year. Although Dr. Kaushal’s list of achievements and contributions to research are impressive, a career in the lab wasn’t always his dream. In fact, Dr. Kaushal once saw himself attending medical school after earning his undergraduate degree. Instead, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in Biochemistry at
the University of Delhi in India, his home country. During his master’s program, Dr. Kaushal was introduced to a group of young, driven scientists who had just come back from their research training in the United States. He was inspired by their intellectual curiosity and dedication to research. It was this connection that inspired Dr. Kaushal to consider a future in the lab.
Upon graduating, he became a Fogarty Foundation International Post-doctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Center for Tuberculosis Research. Dr. Kaushal chose to focus his research on TB because he enjoyed the challenge of combating the number one infectious disease killer in the world. He remains determined to find a vaccine or set of drugs to control transmission of TB.
BECOMING A SCIENTIST
“If you look at how many people TB has killed over the course of human history versus how many people malaria has killed, or AIDS, or syphilis and you put all of these deaths together, TB has killed a thousand-fold more people in the history of mankind,” Dr. Kaushal said.
Dr. Kaushal pursued his newfound interest in research by earning his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Delhi.
In 2001, Dr. Kaushal took his passion for TB research to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Center for Bioinformatics and
“They had very dynamic and different views about how to conduct research,” Dr. Kaushal said. “Their viewpoints encouraged me, and I found my niche.”
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