From 1945 to 1948, a programme at the Department of Biochemistry provided soya milk as a nutritional supplement The Second World War ended with acute scarcity of food and milk in many parts of India. A year before the war ended, in September 1944, IISc created a new post for a Lecturer in Food […]
Manju Bansal, INSA Senior Scientist at the Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU), joined the department in 1972 after completing her BSc and MSc from Osmania University, Hyderabad. She completed her PhD under GN Ramachandran, working with him on theoretical modelling of the triple helical structure of collagen. On the occasion of his birth centenary in 2022 […]
In November 2016, biochemist and author Pranay Lal’s ground-breaking book Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent was published. It was a first-of-its-kind, definitive book on natural history and geoheritage celebrating everything from fossils to fish, volcanoes to viruses, in a quest to understand the processes that shaped Earth and the life on […]
AL Narasimhan joined IISc in 1965. At the time, he was 25, had just completed an MSc degree in statistics, and had also just fled from a job in Gulbarga, Karnataka, after only a month. Despite this false start, he got the chance to join IISc, and begin a lifelong career in administration. During the […]
The first example of academic entrepreneurship from IISc was an attempt to revolutionise personal computing in India The year 1998 was the calm before the storm. India had just declared to the world that it had successfully tested weaponised nuclear warheads. The then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, congratulated the scientists and engineers involved […]
A closer look at how industrial acoustics and noise control research began at the Institute In 1896, Henry Ford drove his first experimental automobile down the streets of Detroit in the United States. “My gasoline buggy … was considered something of a nuisance, for it made a racket and scared horses,” he wrote in […]
“He was a man who devoted his life to developing new areas and institutions of science and technology” In 1966, when Arkal Shenoy travelled to the US to join a PhD programme at the Georgia Institute of Technology, after completing his Master’s from the Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) at IISc, he didn’t have his […]
The erstwhile ICE Department contributed to indigenous engine technology in the early years of India’s industrial development There once was a particularly popular department at IISc called the Department of Internal Combustion Engineering (ICE), and for close to a quarter of a century, the engineers there designed, constructed and tested a plethora of engines […]
A glimpse into the origins and evolution of product design at IISc In a cotton field in Gujarat, the pickers have a delicate and labour-intensive task before them. That task is now less tiresome than earlier because they are trying out a light-weight, battery-powered device which makes their job faster and easier. These are […]
