Meet the Metallurgist Who Champions People’s Science

  YC Subrahmanya studied metallurgy at IISc, during 1948-51. He was taught, among others, by Brahm Prakash, who was later an important member of India’s nuclear and space research programmes. Subrahmanya then joined the Ordnance Factories as an Assistant Works Manager and went on to have a long career, retiring as a Deputy Director-General. Now […]

A Mathematician’s Bond with IISc

Eric Lord, a British-born mathematician, was a visiting scientist at IISc for over two decades. He first came to the Institute in 1972, and later returned to Bangalore, the city he loved, for good. A man of varied interests, Eric has written books about general relativity, mathematics, crystallography, and paranormal phenomena. He has also illustrated […]

The Indian Science Congress at IISc

What old brochures of the event tell us about its purpose, and about how IISc saw itself The Indian Science Congress (ISC), an annual gathering of scientists, was begun in 1914 by two British chemists, JL Simonsen and PS MacMahon, who wanted to model it on the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In […]

Satish Dhawan: The Father of Experimental Fluid Dynamics in India

It was in 1946 that Dhawan arrived at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT, now Graduate Aerospace Laboratories), wanting to work with Hans Liepmann. But the Indian students Liepmann had worked with until then had given him the impression that “perhaps the select group that came to Caltech from India […]

Structures in Turbulence: An interview with Garry Brown

Garry Brown is professor emeritus at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. He is a distinguished fluid dynamicist, well-known for his work with Anatol Roshko where they found unexpected order within turbulent flow. He was at IISc in late 2017, teaching a course on shear turbulence with his friend Roddam Narasimha. Excerpts […]

Learning for All

The Centre for Continuing Education has something for everyone     The Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) grew out of an awareness that, for institutions like IISc, imparting knowledge to people beyond their boundaries is an important part of their service to the community. Continuing education, as a brochure from CCE’s early years states, is […]

Participants of an INUP Hands-on Training Program (Photo courtesy: INUP/CeNSE)

Nanotechnology for the Nation

The Indian Nanoelectronics Users’ Program (INUP), at IISc and IIT Bombay, is training researchers across the country to build national capability in nanoelectronics Since it began in 2008, the Indian Nanoelectronics Users’ Program (INUP) has received exceptional positive feedback from its participants. Among them are college teachers who say that their participation in the training […]

Satish Dhawan (left) and Roddam Narasimha (centre), with KR Narayanan (Photo courtesy: Roddam Narasimha)

‘Dhawan introduced a new personality to IISc’: Roddam Narasimha

Roddam Narasimha is the DST Year-of-Science Professor at the Engineering Mechanics Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. Narasimha, a former professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IISc, was one of Satish Dhawan’s earliest students. In this excerpt from a wide-ranging interview, he shares his memories of Dhawan.   What was […]

Outsmarting the Hepatitis C Virus

How researchers at IISc are working on turning research on translation to translational research When Saumitra Das was a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles, he discovered how to inhibit polio virus translation. That is, how to stop the virus from hijacking its host cell’s machinery to manufacture its own proteins. Das had […]

Hans Liepmann with his wife Dietlind (Photo courtesy: Roddam Narasimha)

Hans Liepmann: The Teacher Who Had a Lasting Influence on Satish Dhawan and Roddam Narasimha

In 1964, Hans Liepmann from Caltech arrived at IISc for a term. SM Deshpande, then doing his ME in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, remembers the “glorious combination” that resulted. “Liepmann taught our batch,” says Deshpande, now at the Engineering Mechanics Unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. “We were very lucky. […]