How a Hepatitis B Vaccine was Made in India

  P N Rangarajan is currently the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry, IISc. He obtained his PhD from IISc in 1989 and carried out his postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, USA. Since joining IISc as an Assistant Professor in 1993, he has carried out research in the field of eukaryotic […]

What is AI Good For?

  In his 15 years at Google, Jay Yagnik has led many foundational research efforts in machine learning and perception, computer vision, cybersecurity, quantum AI, and more. He has contributed significantly to the success of some of Google’s most popular projects, like Google Photos, YouTube, Search, and Maps. An alumnus of IISc, Yagnik was back […]

Why knowledge isn’t the barrier to water conservation

Veena Srinivasan is a Senior Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore, where she leads the Water, Land and Society Programme. Her research interests include the impacts of urbanisation on water resources, an issue that comes back to haunt major Indian cities and enter the national discourse every […]

Cracking the Puzzle of the “Mother of All Molecules”: A Conversation with Venki Ramakrishnan

How is genetic information translated into chains of amino acids which combine to form proteins, the building blocks of life? In Gene Machine, published by Harper Collins India, Nobel Laureate and the President of the Royal Society Venkatraman Ramakrishnan – better known as Venki Ramakrishnan – answers this fundamental question in biology even as he […]

How Mathematical Modelling Helped Control AIDS in India

The limited success of National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) I and II set up in the 1990s meant that the government had to something different to control HIV spread: India had roughly one-eighth of the world’s HIV burden. And in 2002, the US National Intelligence Council projected that by 2010, about 20-25 million people will […]

The ABC of X and Y

Jennifer Graves is Distinguished Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Her groundbreaking investigations into how genomes are organised in Australia’s unique fauna have yielded insights into our understanding of evolutionary genetics, particularly the function and evolution of mammalian genomes. She is also well known for her influential studies on human sex chromosomes and […]

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 […]

“Simplifying solutions can make science more application oriented”

Fathima Benazir and Alex D Paul were classmates in school. Many years later, Fathima, a postdoctoral fellow at IISc, began looking for opportunities abroad and happened to share her research work with Alex who comes from the corporate sector. Alex, after going through her work, encouraged Fathima to come up with a product that can […]

“Whenever the Government Needs Any Input, They Consult Us”

The Divecha Centre for Climate Change was set up in IISc in 2009 with funding from US-based philanthropists, Arjun and Diana Divecha, and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, founded by British investor Jeremy Grantham. Since its establishment, the Centre has focussed primarily on research, and on raising awareness on climate change […]

Dealing with Dementia: Diagnosis, Causes and Coping with Cognitive Decline

Doctors and scientists are on a mission to understand this complex neurodegenerative disorder One morning, Ragini, a resident of Chennai, caught a glimpse of her 67-year-old mother, Lakshmi, using a toothbrush on her own reflection in the mirror. Ragini was taken aback by what she saw – her mother was in good mental health and […]