‘I was the umpire who said “Out!” when Kapil Dev took his record-breaking wicket in 1994’

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 […]

Photography in the Time of COVID

When Sunanda Vinayachandran came to Bangalore, she joined the Department of Biotechnology at St Joseph’s College as a faculty member, a department which she also headed for a few years. She had then just moved to the campus of IISc with her husband, PN Vinayachandran, Professor at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Sunanda, […]

Making Safety a Priority

The Office of Laboratory Safety and Environmental Health (OLSEH) at IISc, barely three years old, is on a mission to bring the 111-year-old Institute’s safety practices up to global standards. CONNECT caught up with the Chair of OLSEH, Sushobhan Avasthi, Associate Professor at the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering, who spoke about the setting […]

‘The fact that my patients needed me kept me motivated’

Healthcare professionals across the world have been working relentlessly during the pandemic. With dozens of cases reported from IISc, Connect spoke to doctors at the Institute’s Health Centre about their experiences during these challenging times.   What changes did the Health Centre have to make, in order to deal with the pandemic? Dr R Nirmala: […]

Understanding COVID-19 Through the Lens of the Social Sciences

COVID-19 has brought upon us an extraordinary situation, throwing our lives into tumult. While the crisis is largely being reported and understood from the biological and epidemiological viewpoints, we tend to sideline the fact that it is essentially a watershed moment in human history. Connect spoke to scholars from the social sciences and humanities about […]

‘People took pride in their work and in the Institute’

Jawaharlal Vaid, 88, was at the Institute from 1951 to 1957 at the Department of General and Applied Chemistry (eventually renamed Inorganic and Physical Chemistry), doing his Master’s and PhD. He went on to have a distinguished career in industry, working for the Indian Telephone Industry, and setting up India’s first capacitor plant for Jay […]