Snehasikta Swarnakar (born 1963) is an Indian chemical biologist and the senior principal scientist at the Division of Cancer Biology and Inflammatory Disorder of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology. Known for her studies in the field of gastric, ovarian, head and neck cancers, Swarnakar is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India and the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for her contributions to biosciences in 2007. Biography Snehasikta Swarnakar, born in 1963 in the Indian state of West Bengal, secured a PhD in 1993 from Jadavpur University for her thesis, Studies on a sialic acid-binding lectin from albumin gland of apple snail Pila globosa, working on junior and senior research fellowships from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and moved to the US for her post-doctoral work which she completed at the University of California, Davis and Marine Biological Laboratory during 1994–97. She started her career in 1997 as a research scientist at the Stony Brook University where she worked until 2001 and on her return to India, she joined the Division of Cancer Biology and Inflammatory Disorder of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology where she holds the position of a senior principal scientist. In between, she had two stints as a visiting scientist abroad; first at the Scripps Research Institute in 2002 and then at the University of Connecticut in 2007. She is also a visiting professor at the Department of Environmental Science of the University of Calcutta. Swarnakar resides along Lake Road in Kolkata. Legacy Swarnakar's research is focused on cancer biology and she is known to have conducted basic and translational research on various types of cancers such as lung, brain, oral, breast, pancreatic, blood and cervical cancers. She led a team of scientists who worked on the therapeutic properties of turmeric and they identified that the controlled dosage of curcumin, an ingredient of turmeric which gave the rhizome its yellow color, acted as a therapeutic agent for gastric inflammation and ulceration. They demonstrated that curcumin increased MMP2 enzyme level while deceasing the MMP9 enzyme, thus ensured balance of the two enzymes which acted in opposite ways in the formation of new blood vessels. They also proposed a treatment protocol for gastric ulcers with