Professor Utpal Banerjee

2000 Faculty Prize Recipient

Image of Utpal Banerjee

Utpal Banerjee left his native India to pursue his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1988. Although his specialty when coming to Cal Tech was physical chemistry, it was while there that his rising enthusiasm for genetics led him to begin his pioneering work on the red-eyed fruit fly–drosophila melanogaster.

Professor Banerjee has demonstrated how cell development in the simple fruit fly parallels that in more complex creatures. His identification and analysis of the Sos gene was a significant breakthrough in the study of oncogenes. Sos has been used as a reagent in cancer diagnosis. Professor Banerjee’s research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He has been the recipient of several research awards from the McKnight Endowment, the American Cancer Society, the Burroughs-Welcome Fund, and the Sloan Foundation. He holds joint appointments in the Department of Molecular, Cell, and Development Biology and in the Departments of Biological Chemistry and Human Genetics in the UCLA Medical School.

In addition to his outstanding achievements in research and with his graduate students, Professor Banerjee is renown for his teaching skills in undergraduate courses, including his department’s introductory course in genetics. He is one of the most highly rated teachers at UCLA by both his students and his colleagues. He has been honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award from his own department, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching by the UCLA Alumni Association, as well as the Gold Shield Faculty Prize.