ASTRA CONFERENCE 2026

Soumi Chatterjee

Young Investigators, Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney

Soumi Chaterjee is a PhD scholar at the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney. Her research focuses on understanding immune-epithelial remodeling during fetal development and barrier formation in early life. Soumi integrates advanced imaging techniques, histopathology, and spatial transcriptomics, to study how immune cells and epithelial tissues communicate during development in barrier tissues like gut. She complements these approaches with 2D and 3D intestinal epithelial culture systems and organoid models to examine the mechanisms that shape barrier formation during early life.

She is fascinated by how much of immune conditioning already takes place before birth and the massive impact this has on lifelong health and immunity.  Her work aims to understand how immune training before birth influences lifelong health, with the long-term goal of informing new strategies to prevent infection and chronic disease.