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Ritabrata Munshi is a mathematician specialising in number theory. He is affiliated to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Number theory is a branch of mathematics that studies properties of positive integers or whole numbers that do not have a fraction or decimal part. Munshi made significant contribution to the number theory, in that he linked arithmetic geometry, representation theory and complex analysis in many ways. For this, he was awarded the Ramanujan Prize which is given for mathematicians under the age of 45 from a developing country.

Ritabrata Munshi did his doctoral studies at Princeton University in the U.S with Sir Andrew Wiles, a famous mathematician. After a few post-doctoral years in the U.S, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India.

He has received many awards for his work, including the Infosys Science Foundation's 2017 award in mathematical sciences, the Birla Science Prize (2013) and the ISI Alumni gold medal. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2015. He was also awarded the ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2018.

Munshi was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016. Munshi was awarded the Swarna-Jayanti fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. He was also elected a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016.

In 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). He was elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2020.

He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society and the Hardy-Ramanujan Journal.

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Charusita Chakravarty was an Indian academic and scientist. She was a professor of chemistry at IIT - Delhi. She was also an Associate Member of the Centre for Computational Material Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru.

When she started her career, women were not taken very seriously in the field of science. Dr Charusita Chakravarty was determined to excel in her field. She raised her voice against the gender bias in the STEM fields. (STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine). She encouraged other women also to enter these fields.

She was born in Massachusetts in the US as her parents were leading economists there. However, she was raised in Delhi. Being a single child and growing up in a liberal environment gave her the courage to defy boundaries from an early age. She was also keen on poetry and music.

She topped the Delhi Higher Secondary Board and also Delhi University in her B. Sc Chemistry from St. Stephens College. She did a Natural Science Tripos from Cambridge and then her PhD, on quantum scattering and spectroscopy. She did her post-doctoral studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Her fields of interest also included theoretical chemistry and chemical physics, the structure and dynamics of liquids, water and hydration, nucleation and self-assembly. Her articles have come in national and international journals.

She received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology and also the B.M. Birla Science Award. Sadly, on 29 March 2016, Chakravarty passed away after a long and arduous battle with breast cancer.

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Samir K. Brahmachari is a biophysicist who is among the first in utilizing computational tools for genome analysis. He has developed many bioinformatics tools. His research led to the creation of the genetic profile of Indians known as the Indian Genome Variation Project. This was later extended to include all East Asian countries.

He was the first to market the novel, globally competitive bio-informatics software products from CSIR. He has 12 patents, 23 copyrights and 155 research publications to his credit.

Brahmachari did BSc and MSc in chemistry from the University of Calcutta. He earned a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. He did post-doctoral research at Paris Diderot University. Then he was a visiting scientist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

He worked as a Professor in Indian Institute of Science and also served as a Visiting Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

Then he became the Director General of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and Secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India. He was the Founder Director of Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi and the Chief Mentor of Open Source for Drug Discovery (OSDD) Project.

The J.C Bose Fellowship Award is one among the many honours that he has received.

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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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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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