Aindrila Mukhopadhyay

Aindrila Mukhopadhyay is an American scientist who is the Division Deputy of the Biological Systems and Engineering Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research involves microbial engineering for the production of biofuels. She was nominated a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022. In 2025 Mukhopadhyay was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Early life and education Mukhopadhyay is from West Bengal, India. Her father is a surgeon and a painter. She moved to the University of Chicago in 1996, where she worked toward a doctorate in organic chemistry. She studies biological processes (e.g. stress response, signaling and membrane transport) in microbial systems. Mukhopadhyay makes use of a variety of biochemical approaches to understand environmentally important model (sulphate and cyanobacteria) and non-model organisms (Pseudomonas stutzeri, Desulfovibrio vulgaris and Agrobacterium tumefaciens). She is part of the United States Department of Energy Enigma project.

Mukhopadhyay combines protein and host engineering to improve the production fuels, using microbes such as Escherichia coli and Corynebacterium glutamicum. In 2016, Mukhopadhyay engineered a bacterial strain that can permit the one-pot production of biofuels from a slurry. The strain had an amino acid mutation on the rcd gene, and was particularly tolerant to ionic liquids.

Alongside her work on biofuels, Mukhopadhyay has investigated environmentally-friendly pigments. She investigated how well Rhodosporidium toruloides can express nonribosomal peptide synthetases. She showed that Rhodosporidium toruloides (a fungus) bioengineered to convert amino acid molecules into indigoidine, a blue pigment that can be used in the textile industry.

Awards and honors 2019 Finalist C3E Awards: Mid-career women in clean energy 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2025 Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology

Selected publications

Personal life Outside of the lab Mukhopadhyay is an artist who sketches the buildings of her neighbourhood, San Francisco's Mission District.