Ipsita Mohanty

Dr. Ipsita Mohanty is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences and Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University. Her research focuses on decoding chemical communication between the host and the microbiome using mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and data science.

Dr. Mohanty completed her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, where she graduated with a silver medal. She then earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. During her doctoral research, she applied untargeted mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to explore the chemical diversity of marine sponges and mapped their associated microbiomes using 16S rRNA sequencing, revealing links between microbial communities and natural product chemistry.

She conducted her postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego in the laboratory of Professor Pieter Dorrestein. There, her work focused on expanding the known diversity of bile acids, important signaling molecules involved in host-microbiome interactions. By developing novel large-scale data-mining strategies for untargeted LC-MS/MS datasets, she demonstrated that the diversity of bile acids present in biological systems was vastly underappreciated.

The Mohanty Lab integrates metabolomics, computational data mining, and enzymology to uncover the small molecules that mediate communication between microbes and the host. By discovering and characterizing previously unknown metabolites and linking them to microbial enzymes and host physiology, her research aims to illuminate how chemical signals produced at the host-microbiome interface influence health, aging, and disease.

Research Program Centers on Three Themes:

• Discover: Repository-scale mining, untargeted LC-MS/MS, and in silico annotation to expand the atlas of microbially-modified metabolites and their enzymes.
• Decode: High-throughput enzyme-substrate screens, activity-guided fractionation, and receptor panels to map who does what and how messages act on host targets.
• Modulate: Conduct mechanistic studies in models of diet, drug exposure, and aging to test causality and identify the impacts of interventions.
  

Awards and Recognitions

• Early Career Rising Star Award, Metabolomics Association of North America, 2024
• Elected Co-Chair, Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) Metabolomics and Human Health, 2027
• Bagwell Undergraduate Research Mentor Fellowship, Georgia Tech, 2021
• Institute Silver Medal, IIT Kharagpur, 2017