text: Abhik Ghosh was born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, in 1964. He attended St. Lawrence High School (1971–1981) and South Point High School (1981–1983). As a child, he learned Sanskrit from his grandmother Ila Ghosh (née Roy), a language he still speaks and reads fluently.
  Abhik obtained a B.Sc. (Honours) in chemistry from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, in 1987, winning the University Medal of the Faculty of Science. The same year, he moved to the University of Minnesota, where he completed a PhD under the supervision of Regents' Professor Paul G. Gassman (while also collaborating with Jan Almlöf) in 1992 and subsequently also postdoctoral research with Lawrence Que Jr. During this period, Abhik reported some of the first high-quality ab initio and density functional theory calculations on bioinorganic systems, helping lay the foundation of the now thriving field of computational bioinorganic chemistry. He did a brief, second postdoc with David Bocian at the University of California Riverside, in the course of which he derived significant new insight into the problem diatomic ligand discrimination by heme proteins.