Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan (“Balki”) has spent over five decades at IISc. Upon completing his BE (Hons) from the Coimbatore Institute of Technology, he pursued his PhD from the Department of Aerospace Engineering, IISc, where he continued as a faculty member. He contributed to diverse areas, including aerospace electronics, computational electromagnetics, and information security. He also played […]
What IISc scientists are doing to help solve the city’s civic challenges In the 2014 Malayalam film Bangalore Days, the character played by actor Nivin Pauly is asked during a job interview about his opinion of being posted in Bangalore city. With a shy smile, he thinks, “Who can say no to Bangalore?” That […]
The need for archives in academic institutions In a pivotal scene in the sensational Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer, the protagonist, J Robert Oppenheimer, meets Danish physicist Niels Bohr while struggling with his research at Cambridge University in the early 1920s. Bohr urges Oppenheimer to move to Germany and study under the famed physicist and […]
2023 marks the birth centenary of the influential mathematician Harish-Chandra who spent two important years at IISc “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” declared the Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei in an essay titled The Assayer published in 1623. Mathematics is an indispensable tool for physicists who strive […]
IISc has made significant contributions to the development of Tejas, India’s Light Combat Aircraft In July 1940, during the early stages of World War II, the skies over Europe rumbled as the Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany’s air force, launched a massive attack on Britain’s Royal Army and Royal Navy. For months, the two sides battled […]
From 1945 to 1948, a programme at the Department of Biochemistry provided soya milk as a nutritional supplement The Second World War ended with acute scarcity of food and milk in many parts of India. A year before the war ended, in September 1944, IISc created a new post for a Lecturer in Food […]
A small woodland in IISc is the result of a successful three-decade-long ecological experiment In the heart of Bangalore, a city known for its beautiful gardens and majestic trees – now dwindling – lies the lush green campus of IISc. Within it is a small patch of unmanicured woods, populated by over 49 tree […]
The Photography Club is a forum for students to learn the craft from their peers During the orientation programme marking the start of the 2012–13 academic year at the Department of Computer Science and Automation (CSA), faculty member Chiranjib Bhattacharyya spoke to the incoming PhD students. In the course of this interaction, he told […]
Researchers at IISc are using novel technologies to add to existing materials and to understand material properties About 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors discovered that striking two pieces of rock against each other produces rough edges and stone chips that could be used to break animal bones and scoop flesh off carcasses. And […]
An annual synthetic biology competition has spurred UG students to develop novel solutions In the early 1960s, French scientists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod figured out how gene expression in bacterial cells is regulated. Since then, scientists began dreaming of manipulating these regulatory circuits in the bacterial genome (the entire set of its genetic […]
