‘People think talking about mental health will make it worse. That’s not true’

Deanna Barch is a well-known figure in the field of psychiatry. She has spent over three decades studying the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the development of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia and depression. While her research primarily focuses on adults, she also studies the risks of mental illness in children due to early adversity, such […]

Beyond Brick and Mortar

Unique centre at IISc’s Challakere campus exemplifies sustainable construction   The temperature was a sizzling 40°C on the morning of 24 April when I reached the IISc campus in Challakere. Summers in this area have become worse in recent years. The sweltering heat was becoming unbearable as I made my way past various buildings to […]

Scientists on Sci-fi

How the genre has evolved and influenced researchers   It was early 2005. GK Ananthasuresh had joined IISc a few months before. His neighbour in the campus quarters then was Utpal Nath, another faculty member who was researching gene mutations in plant leaves. It was known that certain genes are responsible for facilitating differential growth […]

Out of Bounds

Have we pushed the Earth beyond habitable conditions?   Twenty four years ago, Govindasamy Bala was a young physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA. He and his colleague, Ken Caldeira, were carrying out research using a comprehensive climate model. For the first time, they wanted to test an improbable and controversial […]

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 […]