Category Career Queries

Why is Soumen Basak famous?

Soumen Basak is an immunologist and virologist at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi. He heads the Systems Immunology laboratory there.

He is known for his studies on NF- kappaB, a molecule that controls the activity of a gene.

Dr. Basak did his M.Sc. and PhD in Biochemistry from Calcutta University. He went on to the University of California, San Diego for post-doctoral studies.

He was awarded the National Bioscience Award for Career Development in 2018 and won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in biological sciences the next year.

Dr. Basak is a fellow of all three Indian Science Academies, namely the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

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What do we know about Kanishka Biswas?

Have you ever noticed that all electric appliances generate heat energy? Do we need to waste electrical energy as heat? Kanishka Biswas, who is an associate professor in the New Chemistry Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, and his team have come up with a novel compound called silver copper telluride(Ag Cu te) which converts waste heat into electricity. Usually, 65 per cent of electrical energy is wasted as heat energy. Silver copper telluride can be used in automobile industry and power plants where much of the energy is wasted as heat.

Kanishka Biswas is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), U.K. He has bagged many prestigious awards and prominent among them is the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, which he won for Chemical Sciences in 2021.

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Why is Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju well known in his field?

Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju is a professor of Chemistry at the University of Hyderabad. He is regarded as one of the founders of Crystal Engineering.

Have you heard of Crystal Engineering? It is designing molecular solids with specific properties. This is done by making use of the interactions between molecules.

Crystal Engineering has developed greatly and Desiraju played a crucial role in this. Now 200 independent research groups in Crystal Engineering exist worldwide.

He has also researched into the non-conventional hydrogen bond, also known as the weak hydrogen bond. These bonds have distinct roles and guide molecular associations. Earlier they were dismissed to be of no significance. Now these bonds are used to understand biomolecules and to create drugs.

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What are the contributions of Binoy Kumar Saikia?

In all our minds, coal is dark black and useful only for burning. Would you like to see fluorescent blue coloured coal? Well, meet this chemist from Assam who developed the technology to make blue fluorescent carbon quantum dots (CQDs) from Indian coal. Binoy Kumar Saikia is a Senior Scientist at the North East Institute of Science and Technology, Jorhat (NEIST).

The blue CQDs are nano particles, meaning very small in size, though they have high stability, good conductivity, low toxicity and are environmental friendly. They are used for various applications especially for medicine and environmental science. The CQD technology patented by Dr. Saikia helps to reduce imports from other nations.

Saikia got the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2021. It is given for seven categories by CSIR and he alone received it in the category of Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences. Dr. Binoy Kumar Saikia was the first one from Assam who won this award after a gap of twenty years.

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Who is Naveen Garg?

Naveen Garg is a Professor of Computer Science at IIT-Delhi. He is interested in the design and analysis of algorithms. An algorithm is a set of rules which can solve a problem in mathematics or computer science.

Naveen Garg completed his graduation and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT- Delhi. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Max Planck Institute for Informatics and also was a research scientist there. Then he joined IIT – Delhi and now he is Janaki and K.A. lyer Cnair Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and also the Dean, AAIP (Alumni Affairs and International Programs). He is also the co-director of the Indo-German Max-Planck Center for Computer Science (IMPECS).

Naveen Garg has secured the Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2001. He won the Career Award for Young Teachers instituted by All India Council for Technical Education in 2004. The Indian National Academy of Engineering presented him with the Young Engineer Award in 2005 and Indian National Science Academy awarded him the Young Scientist Medal in 2006. Also, he was elected as a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2014 and 2020 respectively.

He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2016.

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Which are the major contributions of Sankar Ghosh?

Sankar Ghosh is an Indian-origin immunologist who has won several awards. He is the Silverstein and Hutt Family Professor of Microbiology and Chair of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

He is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is interested in finding out the ways by which a cell controls the conversion of DNA to RNA. This helps us understand the immune system better. His team recently found new ways to diagnose critical conditions like sepsis faster. Sepsis is when the immune system starts attacking the organs in the body as a response to an infection.

Ghosh’s research has been published in the top scientific journals.

Ghosh was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April 2021. He was advisor for the Board of Scientific Counsellors of the National Cancer Institute, the Scientific Review Board of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and the Scientific Review Council of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. He was also member of the Board of Management of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru and in scientific advisory boards of Centre for Life Sciences (CLS) for Peking University and Tsinghua University, China, Shanghai Institute of Immunology, China, and Max-Planck Institute, Freiburg, Germany.

He is on the editorial board of journals including Immunity, Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He was also on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2011.

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