Arun Chakravorty
MD/PhD candidate, UCLA-Caltech MSTP.
AChakravorty at mednet dot ucla dot edu
chakra at caltech dot edu
I am drawn to genetics: how genes specify the identity of cells, and how those cells coordinate to give a tissue its architecture and rhythm. In my PhD in the Cai Lab at Caltech, I asked a deceptively simple version of that question: can the spatial arrangement of cells tell us about their temporal dynamics? With in-situ spatial transcriptomics (seqFISH+), we showed that a single snapshot of the seminiferous epithelium gives us a timeline of the entire process of spermatogenesis; from that timeline, we discovered that Sertoli cells carry their own intrinsic transcriptional clock, one that synchronizes germ-cell development across space and time and seems to create the foundational tissue architecture (Cell, 2026).
I’m now in my clinical years and figuring out where in medicine I want to go. What stays constant is what draws me: tissue architecture and function, how cells arrange themselves to let a tissue do its job, and what breaks down when that arrangement is lost. My goal is to understand that well enough to one day give patients back the function they’ve lost.
Fun fact: if you’re in dark mode, the background is raw imaging data of RNA dots across a small part of a tissue section.
