ABOUT DEVAVANI

Devavani Chatterjea was born and raised in Durgapur in Bengal, India where she grew up listening to her mother recite poems written by Rabindranath Thakur, looking at blazing sunsets that backlit industrial smokestacks, and wanting to travel to all the places she read about in books.  A proud graduate of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, she moved to California for her PhD at Stanford University where she studied with immunologists Samuel Strober and Irving Weissman and poets Christian Wiman and Phyllis Koestenbaum.  A curious biologist, she has studied mangroves, sparrows, sea urchins, tunicates, mice and people at various times in her scientific life.
 
After a stint at Genentech, Inc. in South San Francisco where she worked on drug discovery, she moved to Minnesota where she lives with her family, and teaches cell biology, immunology, and global health at Macalester College.  Her undergraduate-powered research laboratory studies how low-grade allergies to chemicals found in household products can predispose people to chronic pain conditions like vulvodynia. She also works on the epidemiology of vulvodynia with collaborator epidemiologist Bernard Harlow at Boston University who she met during her Master of Public Health studies at the University of Minnesota.  A 2014 residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program brought her back to her beloved coastal hills of Northern California where she met choreographer Donna Sternberg.  Since 2017, Devavani and Donna have been co-creating dances fueled by choreographic and immunologic inquiry that they bring to audiences along with conversations about creativity, science and art.
 
A Brown, queer, immigrant, female, scientist and educator, Devavani is committed to transforming institutes of higher education for improved equity and belonging for Black, Indigenous, students, teachers and practitioners of color in STEM and beyond.