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• • Contact

    Mailing address

    Banerjee Lab Mail Code: 160606 621 Charles E. Young Drive South Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606 Lab telephone: (310) 825-2980

    Please contact Suchandra Ghosh at sghosh@mcdb.ucla.edu for lab related matters and Win Lam at win@lifesci.ucla.edu for administrative matters.

  • Location

    Location on campus

    Banerjee Lab 364 Paul D. Boyer Hall Molecular Biology Institute 611 Charles E. Young Drive East Los Angeles, CA 90095-1570

    http://www.map.ucla.edu/

  • Undergraduates

    Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology. For undergraduate students with questions regarding classes or the Major please contact Student Affairs Officer Dr. Pamela Hurley at pamelah@mcdb.ucla.edu.

    Minor in Biomedical Research. For students with questions regarding the Minor or research opportunities please contact Academic Administrator Dr. Ira Clark at iclark@ucla.edu.

    Life Sciences 10H. For students with questions regarding Life Sciences 10H or research opportunities please contact Dr. John Olson at jmolson@ucla.edu.

  • Graduates

    Apply for our graduate student program

    Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology graduate program applicants can apply through the UCLA ACCESS Programs in the Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Sciences website at http://www.uclaaccess.ucla.edu/UCLAACCESS.

  • Positions

    Join our lab

    The Banerjee Lab welcomes inquiries from innovative and dedicated researchers. Please send your curriculum vitae, research statement, and list of references to chair@mcdb.ucla.edu.

    Job Listings

    If you are searching for job positions at UCLA, please visit the UCLA Campus Human Resources website at http://www.chr.ucla.edu.

Dr. Utpal Banerjee is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, which he has been a part of since 1988. He has a joint appointment in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine and is also Co-Director of the UCLA Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Dr. Banerjee teaches courses in genetics that encourage undergraduates to participate in research and he is the Director of the UCLA Interdepartmental Minor in Biomedical Research. Dr. Banerjee has also taught many genetics and developmental biology classes to undergraduate and graduate students. He is among 20 professors nationally to be awarded a $1 million grant by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to creatively improve undergraduate science teaching (read the news article here). The grant has generously funded the UCLA Undergraduate Research Consortium in Functional Genomics. In 2008, Dr. Banerjee was inducted as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. In 2009, Dr. Banerjee was named the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Life Sciences.

Dr. Banerjee received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, where he also did postdoctoral research training with Professor Seymour Benzer, initiating research in molecular neurogenetics of eye development in Drosophila and working on the sevenless locus. In his own laboratory at UCLA, Dr. Banerjee's research focuses on genetic dissection of cell cycle and cell fate determination during neuronal and hematopoietic development.

In 2000, UCLA named Dr. Banerjee one of the "Best 20 Professors" of the "Bruin Century." He has also been recognized with the Luckman, Ebi, and Gold Shield awards, the highest research and teaching awards in any subject, including humanities and social sciences, at UCLA. Dr. Banerjee's laboratory has authored many publications and review articles. He has served on several National Institutes of Health genetics study sections and has been a scientific adviser to research institutes and foundations.

My research focuses on the fields of Drosophila genetics and developmental biology. My current research interests are in signal transduction and transcriptional control of neural and hematopoietic development. Previous work from my laboratory identified the son of sevenless (sos) gene that participates in all receptor tyrosine kinase signaling pathways. Currently, my laboratory group is identifying novel means by which different signal transduction cascades combine to distinguish between neural and nonneural cell types in the Drosophila eye. We have also made critical discoveries in identifying transcription factors and signaling components that are responsible for hematopoiesis in Drosophila. Using Drosophila as a genetic model, we hope to identify basic molecular strategies that are conserved in development across species and that are disrupted in human cancers. As a new venture, we are using zebrafish as a model system to understand hematopoiesis and oncogenesis.

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