My Science School

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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Dr.Arun Majumdar rose to fame when President Barack Obama nominated him as the Under Secretary for Energy.

A graduate from IIT - Mumbai, he is the Jay Precourt Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and has served in many top positions in the U.S. His research mostly involves nano-scale materials, energy conservation, transport and storage and biomolecular analysis. His current work includes creating a sustainable future through thermal management, waste-heat recovery and applying Al to solve energy and climatic issues.

He was previously the Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was also Professor at University of California, Berkeley, and the first director of the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Before joining Stanford, he was Vice President for energy at Google. He is a member of National Academy of Sciences (2020) and a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (2014).

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Dr. Abhay Ashtekar is famous world-wide for trying to connect Einstein's Theory of Relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics. These two theories are conflicting by nature and scientists are divided between the two. Dr. Ashteker is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity, and its sub-field, loop quantum cosmology.

Abhay Ashtekar’s childhood was spent in many Indian metros, including Mumbai. He went to the University of Texas at Austin for his graduation in gravitation. His PhD was at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Geroch. He held many positions at Oxford, Paris and Syracuse before settling at Pennsylvania.

In 1992, Penn State University created the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry specifically for him. Ashtekar and his colleagues calculated the entropy for a black hole. This matched a prediction made by Hawking. His approach to quantum gravity has been described as "The most important of all the attempts at 'quantizing' general relativity."

Ashtekar was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science and one of only 40 Honorary Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences drawn from the international community. He won the Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society and Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has held the Krammers Visiting Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and the Sir C. V. Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Currently he is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University.

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Ganesan Venkatasubramanian is a professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru. (NIMHANS). His areas of interest are schizophrenia, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), brain imaging, neuroimmu nology, neurometabolism and other areas of biological psychiatry.

He hails from Tamil Nadu and did his MBBS from Stanley Medical College. He completed MD and Ph.D in Psychiatry from NIMHANS. He was a clinical research fellow under Sean Spence in the University of Sheffield. Sean Spence developed the first brain scan lie detector. He was thus trained in advanced brain imaging techniques.

Venkatasubramanian's brilliant achievements in the field of psychiatry brought him many awards and recognitions. He received the Young Scientist Award at the 12th Biennial International Winter Workshop on Schizophrenia in Switzerland in 2004 and the Elsevier Scopus Young Scientist Award for Medicine in 2006. He won three awards in 2009 namely, the Young Psychiatrist Award of the Indian Psychiatric Society, Shakuntala Amir Chand Prize of the ICMR and the Young Scientist Medal of the Indian National Science Academy. He also got the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2018.

He is in the editorial committee of the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine and Asian Journal of Psychiatry published by Elsevier.

He is a member of the Indian Psychiatric Society and co-chaired its Biological Psychiatry section during 2010- 11.

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You might have heard about epidemiologists in the last two years, thanks to Covid-19. You may have read in newspapers or watched on TV epidemiologists expressing their expert opinion on the pandemic. An epidemiologist studies the origin, distribution and prevention of diseases.

Dr. Jeemon Panniyammakal is an epidemiologist working in Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), Thiruvananthapuram. He is an associate professor in the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies in SCTIMST.

Dr. Jeemon hails from Nilambur in Kerala. He has been doing research on cardiovascular diseases for the past 16 years. He introduced a model to reduce the risk for family members who are in the high-risk category for heart diseases. A trial run was done by randomly selecting the families and by bringing lifestyle changes followed by regular check-ups. This was seen to reduce the risk factor. The study was published in the medical journal Lancet Global Health.

Jeemon Panniyammakal completed his PhD from the University of Glasgow, U.K and MPH degree from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology. He has conducted several surveys which are published as research articles. Treatment burden in primary care units, intervention for blood pressure reduction and study of children of epileptic women etc are a few among them. Some of these studies are focused on areas in the Malappuram district. According to Dr. Jeemon, reducing the amount of sugar in one's coffee itself would make considerable difference in people's health.

He won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for medical sciences last year.

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Anish Ghosh is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. He specialises in ergodic theory, Lie groups and number theory and has greatly contributed in these areas of mathematics.

He is a part of the INFOSYS-Chandrasekharan Virtual Centre for Random Geometry which is a group of scientists at TIFR, Mumbai and ICTS, Bengaluru working together.

Ghosh finished his BSc degree from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai and received his PhD degree from the Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2006. His research supervisor was Dmitry Yanovich Kleinbock, renowned mathematician from Brandeis University. He did post-doctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin. After that he started his teaching career as Lecturer in the University of East Anglia, U.K. He then moved on to the Tata Institute.

Anish Ghosh bagged the 2021 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Mathematical Sciences, India's highest science award within the country. He was also awarded the NASI-Scopus Young Scientist Award in 2017, DST Swarnajayanti Fellowship in 2017, Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2018 and B M Birla Science Prize in 2017.

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E.C.G. Sudarshan was an Indian-American physicist and author. A professor at the University of Texas, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times!

He was born in Kottayam, Kerala. He had his college education in CMS College, Kottayam and Madras Christian College, Chennai. He got his PhD from the University of Rochester.

His most important discovery was the Sudarshan-Glauber quantum representation of light. Glauber was infamously awarded the Nobel Prize for this. According to Sudarshan's own words, "The 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn't the one to get it."

He challenged even Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than light. This is the case of Tachyons, which are hypothetical particles and which travel faster than light. His other discoveries include the quantum Zeno effect, non- invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices and computation.

ECG Sudarshan was awarded the Padma Bhushan, in 1976. He also received the CV Raman Award. The Padma Vibhushan came to him in 2007.

In 2005, when the Physics Nobel Prize was denied to him, there was a hue and cry. Many physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy, to show their protest that Sudarshan was not awarded a share of the Prize.

Though side-lined by the Nobel Prize committee, he kept his humour alive. He was also keen on the Vedanta philosophy and often gave lectures on this.

E.C.G. Sudarshan died on 13 May 2018.

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Narendra Krishna Karmarkar a famous Indian mathematician is the one behind Karmarkar's algorithm. An algorithm is a step-by- step solution to a problem. You can call it a recipe book for mathematics.

Karmarkar's algorithm helped to solve problems in linear programming in a novel way. He found this method and published the results while working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

Karmarkar did his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and M.S. from the California Institute of Technology. He then took Ph.D. in computer science the University of California, Berkeley.

After that, Karmarkar joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He continues to work on new architecture for supercomputing. The digital library, IEEE Xplore, has published some of his works.

He received the prestigious Paris Kanellakis Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000. The Prime Minister of India also presented him the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award for 1999.

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Yes, Kanak Saha is a famous Indian astrophysicist and he did receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize.

Do you know what Kanak Saha and his team discovered? They found that a galaxy which is 9.3 billion light years away from the Earth was emitting ultra violet light! His team used AstroSat, India's first multi-wavelength satellite to observe this galaxy. It took them two years to analyze the data and to verify it.

This is an important clue to the origins of the universe, its dark ages and how light originated.

Kanak Saha was born on 04 February 1977 in Cooch Behar, West Bengal. He graduated in Physics from the Scottish Church College in 1998. For Masters, he went to Banaras Hindu University and completed his Ph.D from the Indian Institute of Science in 2008.

He is now working as associate professor of astrophysics at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune. He studies the dynamics of galaxies using cluster computer simulation.

He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2021.

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