Sudeshna Roy, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences · UTHSC College of Pharmacy
Most people picture Memphis soul in a horn section or a guitar riff. Sudeshna Roy hears it in a chemical bond. As an Associate Professor at UTHSC’s College of Pharmacy, she leads a lab that designs brand new molecules to fight tuberculosis and drug-resistant infections, molecules that do not exist anywhere else in the world yet.
Dr. Roy sees Memphis as a city of creators. “Some make music, some make art,” she says. In her lab, the material is different, but the instinct is the same. “In the Roy Laboratory, we essentially call ourselves molecular architects.” Her team designs and builds new molecules from scratch, aiming for better starting points for the medicines of the future, and she describes the work the way you might describe a kitchen. “Like when you cook a meal, you have to have a recipe,” she says. “You have to have your ingredients in specific concentrations, specific amounts, to get the recipe yummy and delicious for everyone to enjoy.” She is quick to redirect the credit for the actual chemistry. “The fantastic discoveries are done by my fantastic team of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars,” she says. “They get all the credit.”
Her focus on tuberculosis is personal. “I’m from India, and where I grew up, in this small town in West Bengal, I have seen TB patients suffering,” she says. It can sound like a disease of the past, but TB is still infecting more than 10 million people worldwide and killing more than 1 million people every year. That memory from West Bengal is what she has carried into every lab she has run since, now at work inside the Roy Laboratory on tuberculosis alongside infections like MRSA and Mycobacterium abscessus.
A lot of the students doing that work are Memphians themselves. Destinee Manning, a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Roy’s lab, grew up in Memphis and now spends her days separating and purifying the compounds the lab creates, running the rotovap system that isolates a compound from the solvent it was built in. For Dr. Roy, that is very much the point.
“Look what Memphis has to offer,” she says. “Its biomedical community, the food, the music, the culture, and all the people. At their core, they’re great people.” Her invitation to the city’s next generation of scientists is direct. “If you are a young Memphian, you can be a scientist. Join UT Health Sciences and contribute to making molecules that can become the next medicine, and you don’t even have to leave the city. You can do everything right here.” It is the kind of soul that does not need Beale Street to prove itself. It just needs a lab, a recipe, and a team of Memphians willing to test one molecule after another until something works.
