Meet Sajal Sen

Sajal completed his bachelor’s and master’s degree in Chemistry at the University of Calcutta and IIT Kanpur, respectively, in India. Sajal then moved to USA to obtain his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan L. Sessler. His PhD research was focused on the development of gold N-heterocyclic carbenes based novel anticancer drugs and their use as chemoimmunotherapy agents. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2021, Sajal joined the group of Prof. Alan Jasanoff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Simons postdoctoral fellow. At MIT, he developed multimodal MRI probes, built on a porphyrinoid chemical framework, for investigating intracellular calcium and cholinergic activity in the brain. In 2024, Sajal joined OHSU as a postdoctoral fellow in the Frank Lab, where he is currently working on developing cannabinoid-based photoligands to study substance use disorder. Besides his research work, Sajal finds interest in following sports, watching scifi movies, and traveling to national parks across USA.