On September 11, after nearly a year’s delay, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research announced the 2022 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, named after the renowned chemist and its first director-general. The contenders for the award―the biggest in Indian science―are nominated by their institutes, and judged by a panel of eminent scientists. Over the years, the winners have been men and women who have added depth to India’s scientific rigour and have encouraged scientific temper in academia.
There are several threads that unite this time’s awardees, one being their humility. Each one of 12 awardees attributed their success to their PhD/graduate students who worked with them, for five to six years, or even more in some cases. “Science is often done as a team,” said Basudeb Dasgupta, theoretical physicist at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. “You need a team to move a mountain, and so this award must be celebrated as a team achievement.”
At the heart of the achievement lies years of patience, the determination to keep going despite failures and their diehard passion for the subject. For instance, Professor Debabrata Maiti, from IIT Bombay’s chemistry department, spent the past 12 years working on a single aspect―developing a cost-, energy- and time-efficient way of transforming simple organic molecules into complex products for use in the agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. “In scientific journeys, there are no shortcuts,” he said. “There had been numerous instances when we were frustrated because we were not getting the desired reactions from smaller molecules. This went on for five to seven years. Naturally, my students were more frustrated because it was their career and future.”
As the supervisor running the lab, it was crucial for him to make headway, especially because government agencies had put in a lot of money. At one point, the team thought it was better to give up. But Maiti persisted. He told them: “Enjoy the journey. That is more important.”
Dasgupta also had his tale of perseverance. He kept thinking about neutrino movements as he ate, slept, walked and bathed. It was during Durga Pujo, when he went back home, that the solution hit him like a bolt of lightning. “I had grown up observing a pendulum displayed at a museum,” said the mathematician. “That childhood memory just somehow became an answer to the question I was grappling with. Science is hard. You need to put in a lot of work and you need a fair bit of luck.”
That answer earned him the Bhatnagar award. “The transition between something not working out and then suddenly working out so beautifully is the eureka moment we scientists live for,” he said. “You do it because you love it.”
The other threads that connect the 12 awardees―all below 45―are modest beginnings, long periods of confusion, and that nagging feeling that you are not quite as good as your colleagues. But, they kept at it. Dipyaman Ganguly, for instance, narrated the story of how he got into his PhD after his bachelor’s degree. “For some family reasons, I wanted to do my PhD in India,” he said. “Back then, doing a PhD after MBBS was not so easy in India. Few universities allowed it. Also, getting a suitable research lab willing to take me up and also pay me was another challenge. I got a chance at IGIB (Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology) in Delhi, as an asthma genetics project was looking for medicos in an immunogenetics lab. But I soon found out that genetics was not the domain that interested me in the grander scheme of immunology. That was a great personal dilemma.” That, however, did not stop him from excelling in his field and getting two PhDs, one in India and one from the US.
For Rajnish Kumar from Raipur, the primary hurdle growing up was money. More than half of the awardees went to government schools in villages; they first tasted city air when they moved out for higher education.
Kumar’s father would support a family of five with Rs3,000 a month. “Yet, the priority in the household was getting good grades and not bring in more money,” said the awardee from the department of chemical engineering at IIT Madras.
Interestingly, each of these eminent scientists got offers from some of the best universities in the world, but chose to work for India’s growth and success. “I wanted to come back because, as a student at TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), I had seen the kind of people who had come back before me,” said Dasgupta. “These were young successful scientists who had... returned after leaving their plush jobs at Harvard and other top places. I felt very empowered. And I have never regretted coming back. As long as the government keeps supporting it, I think India is a fantastic place to do science.”
All 12 awardees THE WEEK spoke to echoed one sentiment. They agreed that they wanted to excel in their chosen fields and requested for some reasonable support from the country to keep them going. They also agreed that the US was more conducive to pursuing scientific research; incentives for scientists to work in the US include work-life balance, lucrative money and job security. Yet, they said India was their home and there was joy in serving your nation. “In the US, when it comes to funding for research, it is an all or zero model,” said Maiti. “You either get everything or you get nothing. At least in India that is never the case. Here we get an opportunity as a researcher to do good work because the funds are very well distributed.”
But, more needs to be done. For example, a scientist who did not want to be named, said: “My research laboratory will require around Rs1.5 crore a year. Raising that much in India is a really difficult task. Comparatively, if I am good at what I am doing, then in the US I might be able to raise Rs10 crore to Rs15 crore. In India, they do not invest in science seriously. The investment has to be 100 times if you really want to do good, big work.”
The scientists also asked for higher investment and patience with results. “Science has its way of giving you returns and history has shown that there is no better investment in people than giving them the tools of modern science,” said Dasgupta.
The other issue, said Kumar, was the lack of youngsters opting for science in India. “For a country of 1.4 billion, why do we have just 12 awardees?” he asked. “The country next door, with the same population, gives thousands of such awards each year.”
Another significant question the awardees asked: “Where are the women?” All 12 awardees this time are men. And, since 1958, when the awards were first given out, only 19 of the 583 winners have been women. In 2013, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists were likely to view a young male scientist more favourably than a female with the same qualifications. Reported The New York Times: “Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.”
Hopefully, the next Bhatnagar awards will see more diversity.
Carbon trapper
RAJNISH KUMAR, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras (Engineering Sciences)
PROFESSOR RAJNISH Kumar―who grew up in a lower middle-class family in Raipur―said his foray into science was a matter of luck. “My parents were never into science; my father had a business that brought in no more than Rs3,000 a month,” he said. “Till class six, I studied in a Hindi-medium government school because the fees was low. But then my father realised that his children should attend an English-medium school. He put all three of us in a convent school where the fees was half of the family’s income. That was the kind of importance he gave to education.”
The change, though, was hard, and he failed class seven as he could not understand English. “I would find it difficult to even understand jokes and would often fake laughter to prevent embarrassment in front of my friends,” he said.
Today, the professor at IIT Madras, who holds a PhD from Canada, speaks immaculate English and has written 2,000 papers on the decarbonisation of Indian industries.
Kumar completed his chemical engineering from Raipur and got his master’s degree from Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science (2001-2003). “I was very good with maths and science and would always top the class, even in engineering college,” he said. Throughout engineering, he sustained himself and supplemented the family income by taking tuitions after class. Scholarships helped, too, right through to his PhD.
He is currently working on how to trap carbon dioxide and keep it from going back into the atmosphere. “As per data, this costs $30 to $50 per tonne of CO2, and in India we emit three billion tonnes of CO2 every year,” he said. “So, the problem is how to make it affordable. The biggest target for me is for India to become net zero by 2070. It is tough, [but] if we can do that, it would be better than winning a Nobel prize because this way we can save millions of people from devastation due to the rise in sea level.”
It was in 2010 that Kumar gave up on permanent residency in Canada to come to Pune, where he joined as a senior scientist at CSIR National Chemical Laboratory. When he returned to India, his salary was Rs40,000 a month as against almost $5,000 (around Rs2.2 lakh) in Canada. “But life is richer here,” he said, “and I will not trade it for anything.”
Searching supernovae
Basudeb Dasgupta | Amey Mansabdar
BASUDEB DASGUPTA, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Physical Sciences)
AS A PRECOCIOUS child, Basudeb Dasgupta had both scientific temper and an artistic bent of mind. He would often solve IIT problems for his friends, although he himself was not too keen to apply for the institute. He had, in fact, got into the National Institute of Design in Class 12. However, his intuition told him to go with physics, and he got into Kolkata’s Jadavpur University for his undergraduate degree. He was so gifted that he got into his PhD without having completed his master’s. He joined TIFR in 2003 and, 11 years later, returned as faculty.
Ever since his PhD in 2009, Dasgupta had been struggling with the question: how do neutrinos―tiny, nearly massless particles found inside huge exploding stars―oscillate collectively? The answer came to him only 12 years later (he had almost given up on his scientific pursuits), from one of his childhood memories during Durga Pujo in Kolkata. And that answer got him the Bhatnagar award. “All the chemical elements that we are made of―iron in our blood, calcium in our bones, oxygen in our breath―are made inside supernovae,” he said. “The manner in which neutrinos oscillate collectively inside supernovae determines how much of the elements inside our bodies are made.”
As a theoretical physicist, the blackboard is his lab. “My work is very similar to that of a mathematician except that, unlike them, we are dealing with physical objects,” he said.
Born in Rajasthan in a “very low middle-class family”, with both parents working for public sector companies, Dasgupta spent his childhood in boarding schools in Delhi. “I was never pressured to do well, but I was highly self motivated,” he said. He was always in the top five in class and was the first from his family to pursue science.
As we were about to leave, we saw a plethora of landscape paintings and still photography portraits on his computer. “This is what I do when I am not doing what I do,” he said with a wide grin.
Cost-effective chemistry
DEBABRATA MAITI, IIT Bombay (Chemical Sciences)
WEEKENDS ARE OFF at IIT Bombay, but professor Debabrata Maiti would rather spend it on campus than anywhere else. This is his sacred space, a sort of meditative workstation. After all, this was where he spent the early 2000s as a master’s student.
Last month, he won the Bhatnagar award for developing a cost-, energy- and time-efficient way of transforming simple organic molecules into complex products mostly used in the agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. This work, which Maiti spent the past 12 years on, has long been a challenge for synthetic chemists. Putting small molecules together to make big ones is difficult because molecules are hugely complex, even the smallest of them, and no two are ever alike. At one point, he and his team thought it was better to give up, but Maiti persisted. And then came the eureka moment.
This mindset of never giving up was built early. Maiti had a humble, middle-class upbringing in a small village in West Bengal’s East Midnapore district. He was the eldest of three siblings, and his parents placed high importance on academics. “I think having the right atmosphere at home made all the difference,” he said. “Even in moments of fluctuating electricity or long walks to school, we were always happy and positive.”
Maiti’s father was a gardener at a government institute; his mother took tuition at home. Maiti was a standout student throughout his life, be it in school, at the Ramakrishna Mission College in Belur, at IIT Bombay or at Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he pursued his PhD and postdoc, respectively. Was he not tempted to stay on in the US? “Well, I never applied for a job there,” he said. “Because I knew if I did, the offer would be too good to refuse. I made it very clear to them that I wanted to return.”
He returned to Bombay, and his family―wife and two sons, aged 14 and 12―now live with him on the IIT campus. “I’m very happy to be in India,” he said. “We are developing the growth story here and we are acing at it.”
Guiding light
AKKATTU T. BIJU, Department of Organic Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (Chemical Sciences)
A.T. BIJU NEVER thought he would one day become a scientist, let alone win several awards for his contributions to the field of chemical science. It all began when he cleared the National Eligibility Test―a qualifying exam for lectureship in colleges―in his final year of MSc chemistry. He also won the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), becoming the first student in his college to do so. “[Until then] I was happily unaware of what research was and what opportunities it entailed,” he said.
Biju’s father ran a tea shop near their village home in Kerala, and although he himself was not highly educated, he made sure to develop scientific thinking in his son. “They created the right background for us; ensuring that we grew up as kind and learned individuals,” said Biju.
In fact, it was at his father’s instance that Biju even applied for a master’s after graduation. “I think I would otherwise be pursuing a job somewhere in Kerala now. At the time, the fact that I was getting a salary was in itself such a huge thing for us,” he said with a chuckle.
He was a senior scientist with the CSIR National Chemical Laboratory in Pune for six years before becoming an associate professor at IISc. Till now, Biju has guided 14 students to their PhDs and is mentoring 12 more. Life as a researcher is not “all comfort”, Biju warned budding scientists. “I leave at 8am and sometimes come back as late as midnight, even though I literally stay right inside the campus,” he said. “And that is where one must recognise the immense support shown by one’s family. I am blessed that my wife and family created the kind of environment one needs when one is deeply engrossed in research. My wife, who is an MSc in physics, declined a PhD seat for my sake. Had she accepted it, it probably would have been a different outcome for the two of us. The full credit for bringing up our two daughters goes to my wife and I am extremely thankful to her for that.”
Strong foundation
DIPTI RANJAN SAHOO, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Delhi (Engineering Sciences)
INSIDE THE LECTURE halls of the sprawling IIT Delhi campus, Dipti Ranjan Sahoo is working on steering more people towards a career in science. And he is insightful and frank in this process. Every year, the associate dean tells his new batch of students that failure is central to engineering.
The Bhatnagar awardee, and the father of a 13 year old, dedicated his win to his students, who he said formed the backbone of all his work. “Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail,” he said.
This also forms the core of his expertise in structural engineering―finding out the point at which a structure can no longer take the brunt of an earthquake.
Sahoo first became interested in this branch of engineering after the 2001 Bhuj earthquake. “I was shocked at the way those structures were built and how quickly and easily five-storey buildings crumbled like a pack of cards,” he said. From then on, he began to observe infrastructure more carefully; residential infrastructure with plush high-rises in densely populated cities stood out like a sore thumb. “The trend nowadays is to dedicate the lower floors to car parking and all these only have the columns, not the walls,” he said. “Walls begin only from the upper residential floors. So, the very foundation of the structure is shaky. From a structural engineering point of view, these buildings are highly prone to earthquakes and, if one were to go back in time, one would see that it is precisely such construction that is the most vulnerable to seismic movements.”
Sahoo grew up in Cuttack. His father worked in the civil engineering section of the PWD department and often took a young Sahoo along to watch how roads and buildings were constructed. That led the young boy to pursue a BTech degree in civil engineering and thereafter a master’s at IIT Kanpur. “I enjoyed the very concept of construction so much that I would often play with cans and boxes as building units,” he said. “I was interested in making tall towers out of tin cans and bridges out of boxes.”
His parents had advised him against structural engineering, citing the lack of jobs, but he insisted. What fuelled this passion? “Self motivation,” he said. “I believe there is absolutely no alternative to being sufficiently motivated or ambitious to work on one’s own initiative without needing direction.”
Maths and music
APOORVA KHARE, Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Science (Mathematical Sciences)
IN CLASS 11, during the summer vacation, Apoorva Khare wrote his first research paper on divisibility tests. That was his first brush with research and that is also when he knew he wanted to study maths all his life.
Born to a particle physicist father and a nuclear physicist mother, Khare had been clear about the two loves of his life early on―maths and music. He grew up in Bhubaneswar reading a lot of story books and science fiction, and watching his parents discuss atoms and galaxies. A passionate Hindustani classical vocalist, Khare’s induction into the vast world of maths began early, at home. Both he and his sister, now a genetics professor in the US, would be given maths problems to solve, as a leisure activity. “I can go on for hours at end, shutting everything else out and only doing my maths,” he said. “As a researcher, one lives exactly for that eureka moment when you see the entire solution in all its clarity and full detail. That rush is unmatched; you forget thirst, hunger and everything else.”
So, what was the longest he worked on a problem? “It has to be the one I was working on during my PhD―the very first problem my supervisor gave me,” he said. “There was this missing part I had to figure out to be able to put it all together; it took me months without any progress. Finally one day, when I was in the lift, the solution just popped in my mind. I was ecstatic.”
The work for which Khare won the Bhatnagar prize kicked off at Stanford in 2011. He is now an editor of several journals, father to a seven year old and husband to a techie who is director of AI at Google Cloud.
If not a scientist, who would he be? “I cannot even imagine,” he said. “The sooner you know your calling, the luckier you are. Maybe I would have taken up a teaching job in a school. Either way, it had to be somehow related to maths.”
Taming drought
VIMAL MISHRA, IIT Gandhinagar (Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Science)
BORN IN KANNAUJ, Uttar Pradesh, Vimal Mishra spent most of his early student days at a hostel in Kanpur. His parents―both teachers―played a key role in inculcating in him an academic bent of mind. During holidays, he would spend hours at the family’s vast farm lands, observing water flows, irrigation methods, and more. “I grew up observing the role played by water and the impact of droughts and floods caused by climate change on food production,” he said.
The 2002 floods that ravaged Europe played a pivotal role in shaping Vimal Mishra’s career. It got him further interested in hydrology and water resources, inspiring him to move to Germany to pursue his postgraduate degree. The course taught him to model river flows and develop a flood forecasting system.
Mishra put this specialised knowledge to study the groundwater systems in India; more specifically, the groundwater depletion in north India. He is now Vikram Sarabhai professor of civil engineering at IIT Gandhinagar and his team was the first to develop a groundwater monitoring and forecast system for the country. It is currently being used by several organisations. It provides real-time information on droughts. Earlier, there was no such mechanism to know where droughts might occur, until the crisis became dire. Now, early warnings can be given about areas where droughts could happen. “My research was also related to water availability and so it became the subject of daily conversation with my family,” said Mishra. “I would share climate-related advice and forecasts, which helped them plan accordingly and make their decisions.”
Mishra’s dedication to the field of study that involves analysing climate change impact on water resources earned him the Bhatnagar award, honouring his insights that eventually helped in addressing larger issues like food security.
Prime-d for success
NEERAJ KAYAL, Microsoft Research Lab, Bengaluru (Mathematical Sciences)
IN 2003, when working at IIT Kanpur with his mentor, Manindra Agarwal, Neeraj Kayal solved a well-known problem in computer science. The duo found an algorithm to quickly determine whether a given number is a prime number or not. This, he said, was “completely unfeasible” for the fastest computer. “As they work multiple times faster than a human mind, it seems they are so good,” he said. “But if you ask them to solve complicated problems like higher degree equations, even the fastest computers in the world will take more time than the age of the universe.”
It was in class seven that Kayal―who grew up in a middle-class family in Guwahati―entered the top 10 in his class for the first time. “That was a sort of discovery that established a causal link between hard work and rewards,” said the son of a chartered accountant father and homemaker mother. “Since then, I have been very good at studies.”
He eventually did his PhD at IIT Kanpur; most of his batch mates went to the US. “Even applying to US universities involved money and that would have stretched my family financially,” he said. At the time, he was undecided whether to go into industry or keep working in academia. “The algorithm I followed was to just choose to do what I enjoy rather than caring about money and that has worked well for me,” he said.
Kayal donated the cash prize from the Bhatnagar award to two organisations he has known since his school days. “One fortunate thing for me is that I work for a industrial research lab where I am better off financially,” he said.
Kayal always counts his blessings, including his family that includes his wife and 11-year-old daughter.
When not working on algorithms at the Microsoft Research Lab, Kayal enjoys a game of badminton. “But otherwise,” he said, “I am shy and introverted, and like to keep to myself most of the time.”
Tackling TB
ASHWANI KUMAR, Institute of Microbial Technology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (Biological Sciences)
IT WAS AS a postgraduate student that Ashwani Kumar first saw tuberculosis in a lab. His professor, clinician Mridula Bose, gave him a simple job―find bacteria in sputum samples and categorise them. One afternoon, as he was going about his work, he noticed that one of the samples had a TB strain that was resistant to all the drugs they had in the lab. Puzzled, he approached his guide, who told him that they could not do anything as the girl from whom the specimen came had died. “That was the day I realised the lethality of TB. It shook me,” said the scientist, who went on to devote his PhD and postdoc in the US to the in-depth study of the disease. He also published an important paper on what makes the bacteria resistant to drugs, which became the most cited in the field.
As a child, Kumar never thought of being a scientist. He simply went with the flow. “I was good at studies,” he said. “Never the topper, but always in the top 20. As time passed, I pursued a BSc in microbiology because that was what others were doing, too.”
Currently, his work revolves around the treatment of tuberculosis, and his lab has been one of the pioneers in addressing the problem of long treatment duration. “It extends to six to eight months and, as a result, people opt out of it midway,” he said.
A paper he published in the journal Nature in 2016 became a landmark in the field of biofilms―a thin, usually resistant layer of microorganisms that forms on and coats various surfaces―and further enriched the understanding of mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes the disease. Kumar and his team were the first to show that... if one can destruct the biofilms in the lungs, then one could kill mycobacterium tuberculosis faster. “We showed that tuberculosis is a chronic biofilm infection, which will go a long way in India’s goal of eradicating TB because it will shorten the treatment and people will also comply by it,” he said.
When not pursuing microbacteria in his lab, Kumar, married to cancer biology professor Sonal Dotta, enjoys reading books on spirituality.
Will to win
ANINDYA DAS, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (Physical Sciences)
Dr Anindya Das believes that the one aspect that allowed him to achieve what he has become today is his “very humble upbringing”. Das, who heads the quantum transport lab at IISc, Bengaluru, spoke extensively about his childhood days at Garia village in West Bengal’s Midnapore district. There was no electricity at his home till he was 12. He still remembers the huge celebration that erupted when a transformer was installed at the village.
Das was so fascinated by the transformer that he would spend hours observing it, learning and absorbing all that he could about electric current and its dynamics. “It was a revolution when television and electric fan came and that built up a new dream in my mind and an inquisitiveness to learn science. I became aspirational and studied science with great interest,” he said.
Born to a schoolteacher father and a homemaker mother, the very first time Das ventured out of his village was to join college. He travelled to Kolkata to study BSc at Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandir in Belur. Until then, his dream had been limited to being a teacher, just like his father. “In a village, a schoolteacher is a highly regarded individual and teaching is the noblest profession. I had no idea about discoveries and inventions, as those were limited to books. There was no real exposure to such things in real life.”
Das went on to pursue his masters and doctorate from IISc and did his postdoctoral studies in Israel. Today, his group at the IISc works on quantum transport of nano-devices at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields. “I think the hunger to learn and achieve is what really shapes a person,” said Das, who was the first person from his village to earn a PhD. “I had the dream, the desire to walk the extra mile and the belief that I could do it. I think it made all the difference.”
Dream and deliver
DIPYAMAN GANGULY, Translational Research Unit of Excellence, CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (Medical Sciences)
EARLY IN OUR interview, Dipyaman Ganguly, a scientist with two PhDs to his credit, talked about the two aspects of his life which had significantly contributed to his success. The first one was his decision to focus on experimental science instead of being a practising physician, which he was originally trained to be. “This has got a lot to do with a group of my childhood friends who kept on pushing me to gain the maximum of whatever potential I had, as per their understanding,” he said. Ganguly also credited his parents who happily accepted his career decisions. And the second one was his pursuit of scientific research.
“I think the most crucial thing in life that made me what I am today is an inherited focus on academic scholarship, instead of focusing on being financially successful. I belong to a not so well-to-do family from a Kolkata suburb, but my parents have always been concerned about me realising my full academic potential, rather climbing up the financial ladder quickly.” Although Ganguly was always fascinated by human biology and modern medical science and wanted to be a doctor, it was clear to him and his family that he was not going to practise medicine. “From the very first year of medical school, all my closest friends knew that I was going for research in immunology. Finally, I have been very open about making friends with people having different interests. My closest friends from childhood till date include an economist, a cinematographer, a poet, a journalist, an astronomer and, of course, a number of very erudite physicians.”
Ganguly said that it was very important to remain open to new things which helped bring a general cognitive liberation, allowing one to perform better in one’s own domain as well. Unsurprisingly, he is quite popular among his students. “Well, right from my tantrums, my vulnerabilities, my sheer love for night sky gazing, my fascination with Rabindranath Tagore, my love for writing about science for children, they have seen it all,” said Ganguly. “I had a dream of starting small-scale rural science centres in different parts of West Bengal. We started the work towards achieving that, but the pandemic stalled it midway. I hope we can reinitiate the effort.”
Protein power
MADDIKA SUBBA REDDY, Laboratory of Cell Death and Cell Survival, Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad (Biological Sciences)
MADDIKA SUBBA REDDY’S lab focuses on understanding how proteins talk to each other while executing their functions in cells. Studying interaction partners for different proteins can reveal their function better in cells. This is what Reddy does―finding interaction partners of different proteins, which, in turn, helps in the understanding of human diseases, as any alteration in the interactions between proteins leads to diseases.
Reddy’s group has made several important discoveries in establishing the protein networks required to maintain cellular balance, and this knowledge can provide future therapeutic targets for different diseases. One of the challenging phases of his career came during his PhD days. “I joined a lab in Germany for my PhD where I started making a transgenic mouse (a genetically modified mouse) for a particular gene. After spending a year there, we did not find any phenotype/defects in the mouse, which was disappointing,” he said. Reddy then switched to a different lab with a different research area for his PhD. “I was given the task of identifying a new enzyme that does peptide isomerisation. Again, after spending almost an year, I ended up identifying a fragment of a protein which was known to do this process (instead of a new enzyme).”
With two failed projects in two years, the journey of PhD looked rather difficult. However, unwilling to give up, Reddy moved to Canada and chose another area of specialisation―his current one, cell biology―for which he got the Bhatnagar award. He eventually finished his PhD in less than three years. “The bottom line is that you should not give up easily on your dream,” said Reddy. He now supervises 33 students, including doctoral and postdoctoral scholars and project trainees.