The lensing of waves is helping us look deeper into space Arthur Eddington was growing anxious. It was nearly 2 pm on 29 May 1919. The British astronomer was standing on a plateau overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the west African island of Príncipe. A rare solar eclipse, not seen in 500 years, […]
Author: Ranjini Raghunath
Hi-Tech Healthcare
Digital technologies are changing research and treatment In 2018, Vijay Chandru was already thinking about pandemics. He was back on the IISc campus, where he had co-founded India’s earliest genomics startup, Strand Life Sciences, nearly 20 years ago. Now a visiting faculty member at the Department of Bioengineering (BE), he started teaching a course on […]
Live Long and Prosper
With a mushrooming elderly population, research on ageing is gathering steam Among Greek myths, the tale of Tithonus is particularly tragic. Eos, the immortal goddess of dawn, fell in love with the mortal Tithonus, a prince of Troy. She begged Zeus, the ruler of Greek gods, to grant Tithonus eternal life, but forgot to […]
An Uphill Battle
Researchers, doctors and communities work together to manage a neglected disease The first time Nagendra Kumar P started experiencing extreme pain was when he was a toddler. “He had severe headaches,” says his father, B Pandegowda. “We showed him to small hospitals nearby. He would become better for a few days, but the headaches […]
A Day in the Life of an Assistant Project Engineer
Radhika Muthukumar gave CONNECT a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to supply water to the campus community and treat the wastewater it produces A few metres down the road from IISc’s main gate is an 80-year old building that was designed by Otto Koenigsberger, an architect who left Nazi Germany and worked for […]
Soil Sleuths
Geotechnical engineers, who investigate soils and their properties, play an important and sometimes overlooked role in civil engineering A vacation on a Spanish beach in the 1960s sparked a revolution in the construction industry. French engineer Henri Vidal was piling up sand to build a sand castle when he realised that no matter how […]
Making Learning Fun
How student and alumni-led initiatives are bringing science to young children In 2016, when Suyog Mahulkar, Ashok B, Nilesh Potghan and a handful of other students at IISc decided to start an outreach initiative to teach science and maths at rural schools, they were gung-ho but also a bit “naive”, Suyog admits. Armed with […]
Making Things Work: 75 Years of Mechanical Engineering
Research and teaching aside, the Department has also contributed to the creation of many new programmes and centres on campus Times were tough for IISc in the 1930s. It faced a serious cash crunch – income from both the Mysore Government and JN Tata’s Bombay properties had dwindled. World War II was looming on […]
Remembering Arcot Ramachandran
“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 […]
What IISc Needs to Become World-Class: Interview with Anurag Kumar
In July 2020, Anurag Kumar completed his tenure as the Director of IISc. He began his journey in engineering with a bachelor’s degree from IIT Kanpur and a PhD from Cornell University, and then worked at Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA, before joining IISc in 1988. After serving as the Chair, Department of Electrical Communication […]