National Frontiers of Science (NatFoS) Meeting 2019

Background:
In June 2018, Dr. Mitra was appointed as the Scientific Secretary in the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. Arabinda Mitra started his career in 1985 as a research scholar in the Dept. of Geology, Delhi University. In 1987 he joined the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India as a Scientific Officer and was involved in survey and exploration geology of the Himalayas. In 1988, he was awarded the Cambridge Nehru Fellowship to pursue PhD in Earth Sciences at University of Cambridge, UK. The project work was carried out jointly with MIT, USA in REE geochemistry of mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal systems. His research work has been published in international journals like Nature, Marine Chemistry, Geo-chimica Cosmo-chimica Acta and Journal of Remote Sensing etc.

Background:
Dr. Mahesh Kumar is Chair of Indian National Young Academy of Science (INYAS), and Associate Professor at IIT Jodhpur. He has received M.Sc degree in Physics from University of Rajasthan, M.Tech degree in Solid State Materials from IIT Delhi and Ph.D degree in Engineering from IISc Bangalore. He worked at Central Research Laboratory of Bharat Electronics Ltd. (CRL-BEL) Bangalore as Scientist from 2005 to 2013. He has worked at University of Paderborn Germany through INSA Bilateral Exchange programme and South Dakota State University through prestigious BASE Fellowship supported by IUSSTF. His research interests are focused on 2D materials, Nanomaterials, Sensors, Semiconductor materials and devices.
He has received INSA Medal for Young Scientists-2014 by Indian National Science Academy,the MRSI Medal-2016 by Materials Research Society of India, DAE-Young Achiever Award-2016 by BRNS (Department of Atomic Energy), ISSS Young Scientist Award 2017 by the Institute for Smart Structures and Systems,YSAP mission award 2019 by Global Young Academy, JPhysD: Emerging Leader Award 2019 (Runner-up) by Institute of Physics UK, and PHSS Foundation Young Scientist Award 2018-19 by Prof. H. S. Srivastava Foundation. He is founding Member of Indian National Young Academy of Sciences, Member of National Academy of Sciences India, Royal Society of Chemistry & Global Young Academy and IEEE Senior Member from 2016. He has published more than 90 research articles.

Background:
Dr. Gitanjali Yadav is a Lecturer at the Dept of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, on a Joint Deputation Program with DBT at NIPGR, New Delhi. She is an expert in Genomics and Structural Bioinformatics, with special emphasis on plant communication and food security. Her group works on sustainable agriculture through enhancement of crop productivity.
Dr. Yadav has received the Hamied Fellowship from the University of Cambridge (2019), Exceptional Talent Award from the Royal Society of London, and the Women Excellence Award from Govt of India. She is a graduate with Honors in Botany, with a Ph.D. in Immunology and Master's degree in Biomedical Research.

Background:
Mrutyunjay, an entrepreneurial professor with PhD in Molecular Microbiology from University of Delhi in 2003 and Postdoc at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, he returned to India and established School of Biotechnology under KIIT University in Bhubaneswar. To promote technology and innovation, he also established KIIT-Technology business incubator (KIIT-TBI), promoting deep tech start-up companies. He is a strong promoter of technology for all and works especially in the sector of public health innovation and technology development. Under his leadership, KIIT-TBI nurtured almost 150 start-up companies and created almost 1600+ jobs and established Centre of Excellence, supported by DST, GoI. He is committed to replicate the successful incubation model in other states of East and North East regions of India, for which BIRAC has established the BIRAC Regional Centre @KIITTBI focusing on East and North East states of India.

Background:
Dr. Carl Malamud is an American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He founded the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for developing the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition. Dr. Malamud is the author of eight books, including Exploring the Internet and A World's Fair. He was a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory and is the former chairman of the Internet Software Consortium. He also is the co-founder of Invisible Worlds, was a fellow at the Center for American Progress, and was a board member of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. In 2009 Dr. Malamud received the EFF Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for being a public domain advocate.

Background: Dr. Chandra Shekhar Sharma is an Associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. His research interests are Carbon based hierarchical materials, Nature inspired polymer functional surfaces, Electrospun polymer and carbon nanofibers and Carbon-MEMS. Dr. Sharma is a member of National Academy of Sciences, India and also serving Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (INYAS) as National Core Committee member. Recently, Dr. Sharma has been inducted as Expert Advisory Committee Member of Department of Science & Technology Committee on Waste Management. Dr. Sharma has published 78 papers in International Journals of high repute with more than 1000 citations. He has filed 11 national and international patent applications and four book chapters to his credit. Recently, a Chinese patent is granted also to his lab. Dr. Sharma has guided 5 Ph.D. and 8 M.Tech. Students as of now and presently supervising 12 Ph.D. students. Dr. Sharma has also incubated a start-up company, M/s Restyro Technologies Pvt. Ltd. to commercialize some of the technologies developed in his lab including recycling of polystyrene waste using orange peel and nanofibers based feminine sanitary napkins. Both of these innovations has won several Gold Medals at International level in last two years.

Background:
Satyavrata received a B.Tech in chemical engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, and a doctoral degree, also in chemical engineering, from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg. After a 2-year post-doctoral stint at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he joined the department of chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad as an assistant professor in 2015. At IIT Hyderabad, Satya’s research focuses on the development of functionalized polymeric matrices possessing specific mechano-chemical and architectural properties for application in controlled drug delivery, immunomodulation and the development of in vitro disease models. Satya was inducted into INYAS in January 2019, and is also a life member of the Alpha Epsilon Lambda Graduate Honor Society. Previously, he has received the Paul E. Torgersen Research Excellence Award and the David & Lillian Francis Dissertation Scholarship. In 2017, he delivered the SM Ibrahim memorial lecture at NIT Trichy. Satya currently serves on the editorial board of Scientific Reports.

Background:
Anindita Bhadra is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, IISER Kolkata. She did her PhD at IISc Bangalore, on the social politics of a paper wasp. She joined IISER Kolkata as an IISER Fellow in 2009, where she set up the Dog Lab to work on the behavioural ecology of free-ranging dogs. She is interested in understanding the evolutionary history of dogs using the free-ranging dogs as a model system. Anindita was involved in the founding of INYAS, which she led for the first three years. She is a member of the Global Young Academy and is currently serving on its Executive Committee. She is very interested in teaching and is engaged in various outreach activities, especially involving children. She also writes popular science article quite regularly in Bangla. She has various interests beyond academia. Anindita and her husband run a professional theatre group based in Kolkata.

Background:
Dr. Felix Bast's focus of interest is molecular systematics and characterization of algal biodiversity. He is also working in the related fields of phylogeography and DNA barcoding with a special focus on marine, polar and extreme habitats.

Background:
Dr. Krishanu Biswas, Professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur has made significant contribution towards understanding of the several important scientific and technological aspects of metallurgy and materials engineering. The research work performed by him ranges from development of hard low friction wear-resistant coating for coating applications , complex concentrated alloys (CCAs) including high entropy alloys and entropy-stabilized ceramics, novel processing of ceramic composites, understanding the alloying behaviour at nanoscale, development of alloy catalysis for hydrogen energy. His recent research activities involve research on sintering of nanomaterials, nanocrystalline high entropy alloys (HEAs), ionic nanoparticles, 2D materials etc. He has published over 125 papers in international repute and peer reviewed journals and delivered 40 invited talks in different national and international conferences. Recently, he as co-edited a special issue on “Nanocrystalline High Entropy Materials: Processing Challenges and Properties” in J. Materials Research, published by Materials Research Society, USA. He has also signed contract with Springer Nature to write a book on “High Entropy Materials: Processing, Properties and Application”, to be published by December, 2019. He has completed 12 projects and currently 4 other projects are under progress. He could garner total funding to the tune of 6,00,000,00 (US$8,50,000) in a span of 11 years. The projects include small projects from Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and Indian National Science Academy (INSA) to bigger projects from Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Bio- technology (DBT), Board of Research on Nuclear Sciences (BRNS). He has been actively involved in industrial consultancy with various companies, including MKU Ltd, Kanpur, Tata Steels, Vardhaman Steels etc. Currently, 2 post doctoral fellow, 7 Phd students, 3 MTech students, 2 project staffs and several B.Tech students working on different research problems. 8 Phd students and 30 M.Tech students and large number of B.Tech students have completed their degree under his supervision. He has international collaboration with Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Sweden, USA. He teaches extensively at IITK on variety of subjects including, Phase Equilibria, Manufacturing Processes, Phase Transformations, Process Metallurgy, Solidification Processing etc. He has developed several important web-based courses on NPTEL forum, including Phase Diagrams and Phase Transformation in Materials. He has received a number of awards, fellowships and professional reorganization from various organizations, notable ones being INSA Young Scientist, Metallurgist of Year, Sri Ram Arora Award from TMS, USA, Young fellowship from Global Young Academy, fellowship from West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology etc. He serves in the editorial board of several international journals.

Background:
Dr. Riffat John is senior assistant professor in the Department of Botany, University of Kashmir. Her focus as a plant molecular biologist is to understand the environmental stress tolerance mechanism in plants at proteomic, genomic and metabolomics levels and at the same time genetically engineer plant genome to develop plants resilient to extreme climatic conditions. Her group also is trying to understand the effect of temperature and photoperiod on flowering in plants growing in Kashmir Himalayan region.
Despite various bottlenecks, she has been able to set up a working laboratory and has built up a group of active research scholars. She has also been successful in obtaining extra mural grants. She is recipient of Indo-US Getin Fellowship by IUSSTF in 2017 and Young Scientist Award from Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of Jammu and Kashmir in 2014. Dr. Riffat was inducted as INYAS member in 2015. She has published 31 papers in International Journals and six book chapters.

Background:
Dr. Jitendra Pattanaik's research interest is to understand the Earth’s dynamic processes involved in Earth surface and landscape modification, using different isotopes, trace element and geochemical parameters. He has applied various models using major and trace ions and Sr isotope to estimate the relative weathering rate of different rock types exposed in the river basins and CO2 consumption rate by natural processes. He is also using cosmogenic radionuclides such as 10Be and 26Al as a tool to decipher time and spatial variation of various Earth surficial processes. Recently, He has taken up a new research project to estimate glacial extent in the Schirmacher Oasis (an ice-free area) of East Antarctica during Last Glacial Maxima (LGM) using cosmogenic radionuclides (10Be and 26Al). He participated in the 36th Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica as a summer member and spent 3 months at Maitri station of India, East Antarctica to collect exposed rock. His research findings are being presented at various national and international forums in India and abroad. He has completed my Ph.D. in the year 2010 from Pondicherry University in collaboration with IUAC, New Delhi. He has worked at IISER Kolkata for 5 year after Ph.D. and currently serving at Central University of Punjab, Bathinda since 2015.

Background:
Dr. Kumar is faculty scientist at the Institute of Bioinformatics, Bangalore focusing on various multi-omics approaches and computational genomic data science. He is a recipient of prestigious Ramalingaswami Fellowship (2018) awarded by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India.
He has several years of working experiences on various facet of biology and medicine which includes a Bioinformatics Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Padova in Italy where he established pipelines for Roche 454-based transcriptome analyses for insects and fishes.
Later on, he worked at the Institute of Botany at the University of Kiel in Germany where he established multi-omics approaches for characterizing marine fungi and studied marine fungal adaptions. Currently, he has to his credit, sequencing of the largest numbers of marine fungal genomes in the public domain.

Background:
Dr. Ramanathan’s work spans two areas namely computational chemistry and laser spectroscopy, particularly Raman imaging and quantitative Raman spectroscopy. In computational chemistry, he works on ab initio electronic structure calculations to elucidate the nature of non-covalent interactions in molecular clusters. In Raman imaging, he works on the label-free diagnosis of tumour so as to detect the early onset of any change in the tumour. He uses both spontaneous and non-linear Raman scattering for the imaging purposes and this is a niche area of label-free diagnosis. Besides, he applies spectroscopic techniques to study formulations from Indian traditional medicine repertoire.

Background:
Dr Ruchi Saxena is a Global Health Systems Consultant, working on application of drones and AI for social good and humanitarian aid with projects in sustainable agriculture, nature conservation, disaster management and healthcare.

Background:
Manu is an engineering and management graduate with 16 years of Information technology consulting experience in multiple countries. After completing his MBA from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT New Delhi) he has worked for fortune 500 companies in France, Germany, Switzerland and USA. He has extensively build data-driven solutions for the clients in healthcare and other core sectors. He has authored various papers in renowned journals and books with SAP PRESS in area of Machine Leaning and Artificial Intelligence. Manu is currently pursuing PhD from IIT-Delhi.
Married to a child psychologist and a special educator; Manu Kohli realized what special needs services are. However, the big transformation happened for him and his wife Swati after diagnosis of their own son with Autism. Exploring services in India, US and other few countries in Europe they realized the need of technology to scale up the services with 4 major objectives-affordable service, used by non-experts, available remotely and data driven.
In 2017, Manu returned to India and started CogniABle, a company developing Artificial Intelligence driven digital solutions for early screening and behavioral treatment of Autism and associated disorders. The company has won various Grants and awards from Government of India,

Background:
Biren Banerjee is a trained expert in Molecular Oncology, DNA based Diagnostics and translational research, innovation in healthcare and clinical application based programs. He has completed a PhD in Cancer genetics from Bangalore while working in Department of Medical genetics, Manipal Hospital Bangalore and trained in National University of Singapore (NUS) and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Texas USA. He has established Eastern India’s first DNA based Diagnostics Platform called inDNA Life Sciences in Bhubaneswar and has also Co-founded inDNA Global in London. His research is supported by Department of Biotechnology (DBT) Govt of India and he is working for Molecular profiling of cancer in Odisha. He has published several papers in reputed Journals and reported novel finding highlighting genome signatures of oral cancer in Odisha.

Background:
Himanshu Mehlawat is the founder and CEO of Intraversity- A startup incubated and funded by Indian School of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development. Intraversity is building a platform to connect Indian Talented students with Global Companies and startups through open innovation projects. Mr. Mehlawat has a master’s degree in Business Administration with a specialization in International Business and Marketing. Before Founding Intraversity he worked as the marketing director of Indus Foundation Inc. and Community head of Indo-Polish Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Background:
Saptarshi Mukherjee did his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Javadpur University, Kolkata and carried out his PhD at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata under the supervision of Professor Kankan Bhattacharyya. He did his post-doctoral research with Professor H. Peter Lu at the Centre for Photochemical Sciences, Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He joined the Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal as an Assistant Professor in December 20008 and became a Professor in January 2018. Presently, he is also the Deputy Director of IISER Bhopal.
His research interests include ultrafast and single molecule spectroscopy of molecules having biological relevance, luminescent metal nanoclusters, protein conformational dynamics and surface chemistry.
He is the recipient of the INSA Young Scientist Award in Chemistry (2012), CRSI Young Scientist Award (2018) and a Founding Core Member of INYAS.

Background:
He completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry from University of Calcutta in 2006. He went for Postdoctoral research to various foreign universities like University of California (Davis), University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston). He is a Computational Chemist, interested in probing and providing structural and dynamical insights into the fundamental processes in biology using atomistic molecular modeling and dynamics simulations. He has contributed to several areas of Biophysical Chemistry and Structural Biology, e.g. protein folding and aggregation, protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions, structure refinement, protein-lipid interactions, microsolvation etc. The intrinsic dynamics of proteins and its ligand induced perturbation leading to change in proteins’ function have been his recent areas of focus.

Background:
Dr. Sharma is an Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal. He holds a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Biomedical Sciences from IGIB, New Delhi and did his Postdoctoral Research at RIKEN, Japan. Dr. Sharma is also the founder and coordinator of the Innovation and Incubation Centre of Entrepreneurship (IICE) at IISER Bhopal. The main focus of Dr. Sharma’s lab is to analyze the human gut and skin microbiome in different populations to gain functional insights and also to compare it with the healthy and disease datasets. His group employs machine learning approaches to carry out the large scale human gut data analysis and develop new algorithms and software. Recently, Dr. Sharma’s groups has sequenced the Peacock genome, India’s national bird.

Background:
Dr. Ramray Bhat's undergraduate education was in clinical sciences and his graduate research work was in development and cancer. Since 2015 he leads a group that focuses on glycobiological mechanisms that underlie progression of cancer of breast and ovaries. They use both experimental and theoretical approaches to understand how cancer migrates to newer organs and destroys their functions.

Background:
Dr. Shamik Sen is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT Bombay, India. Dr. Sen earned a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering (1999) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and a M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering (2002) from IIT Kanpur. He then moved on to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (2007) in the lab of Prof. Dennis Discher. Subsequently, he completed postdoctoral training at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), University of California, Berkeley, in the lab of Prof. Sanjay Kumar.
Dr. Sen’s research group at IIT Bombay studies how physicochemical cues encoded by the extracellular matrix regulates stem cell fate and cancer invasion, and how physical properties of cells are dynamically tuned during these processes. For addressing these questions, his group combines traditional cell biological approaches with cell biophysics techniques and computational biology. Dr. Sen has been a recipient of the BRNS Young Investigator Award (2011) and the Swarnajayanti Fellowship from DST (2019).

Background:
Dr. Biman B. Mandal is a Professor at Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG). He received his Ph.D. from IIT Kharagpur and Post Doc from Tufts University, Boston, USA. His research area is Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Mandal has 125+ research articles and 15 patents to his credit. He is recipient of NASI-SCOPUS award, INSA-Medal, NASI-Medal, DST-INSPIRE faculty award along with young scientist awards conferred by DST, DBT, APA and DAE.

Background:
Jayanta Haldar is an Associate Professor at New Chemistry Unit and School of Advanced Materials, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, India. He received his PhD from IISc in 2005 and did Postdoctoral Research from Department of Chemistry, MIT, USA. His research interests are towards the development of molecular strategies for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. He has published more than 70 international peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and review articles. He has many national and international patent on the development of new drugs and new materials to tackle drug resistance and infections. His research work has been featured in Scientific American, Chemical Engineering News, American Chemical Society, BBC News etc. He has been awarded as a Ramanujan Fellow from DST, Government of India, in 2010. He has received BIRAC-GYTI awards in 2015 and 2016 and received Gandhian Young Technological Innovation appreciation awards in 2015 and 2016. He has been awarded CDRI-Awards 2017 for Excellence in Drug Research and received CRSI Bronze Medal 2017 and Sheik Saqr Career Award Fellowship in 2018. He is a winner of 8th National Awards for Technology and Innovation, Ministry of Chemical Fertilizers, Govt. of India-2018. He is an editorial board member of Microbial Pathogenesis and Editorial Advisory Board Members of Biomacromolecules, ACS Infectious Diseases MedChemComm.

Background:
Dr. Vidya did her Ph.D. on the population genetic structure and phylogeography of the Asian elephant at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science (Ph.D.: 2005) and partly at Columbia University, New York. She was a post-doctoral researcher at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, before joining the Evolutionary and Organismal Biology Unit of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, in August 2008. She is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the Unit.
Vidya is primarily interested in animal behaviour and socioecology. The lab currently focuses on Asian elephant social organisation and behaviour, collecting long-term data on physical IDs, genetic IDs, associations, dominance behaviour, and resource availability, in order to understand the relative effects of ecological factors and individual relationships in shaping social organisation. With over 800 elephants individually identified in a population in southern India, this is one of two such long-term studies in the world that monitor the behaviour and ecology of a large number of individually identified Asian elephants.
The lab also works on communal roosting in mynas, and has worked on the comparative phylogeography of large mammals in the Western Ghats and on conservation genetics issues.

Background:
VV Robin has been working on birds from for the last 20 years, much of it on Shola Sky Islands. He has a masters in Ecology from Pondicherry University, a PhD in Ecology and Evolution from NIAS IISc campus, and a PostDoc at Loyola University, Chicago. He has also been an NCBS Fellow, a Salim Ali -Lok Wan Tho Ornithological Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and a National Geographic Explorer. His research interests broadly cover patterns and processes in ecology, behavioural ecology, biogeography and evolutionary ecology. He uses bioacoustics, genetics and remote-sensing based GIS mapping as the primary tools for his research, some of which translates to conservation action. www.skyisland.in

Background:
Manjari's reseach broadly focuses on sensory ecology in animals. In particular, She is interested in the evolution of acoustic communication in animals. A major aim of her research is to examine the influence of social complexity on communicative complexity. She also works on how animals solve problems that arise due to altered sensory environments that are characteristics of human-dominated landscapes. The work done makes use of diverse model systems ranging from insects to mammals.

Background:
Dr. Suresh Babu is the Dean at School of Human Ecology (SHE), Ambedkar University of Delhi (AUD). He is also the Director of AUD 'Centre for Urban Ecology and Sustainability'. His research interests have been broadly in the areas of Ecology, Ecosystem Management and Human Ecology. He started out as a researcher studying rainforest ecology in Nicobar Islands, and of late he has been working in the areas of Ecological Restoration, Ecological Networks, Invasive Species Management and Urban Ecology.

Background:
After completion of M.Sc. in Applied Botany form Mangalore University (year 1998), I joined the team of Prof. Madhav Gadgil, at Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Here I developed interest for lichens. Later, I joined CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow and completed Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. D.K. Upreti (year 2005). Meanwhile I joined the same institute as Scientist (year 2001) and till date successfully completed 20 years in lichen research. My main research interest includes lichen taxonomy and allied aspects. I strongly believe that correct identity of an organism is important before any research on that organism. Since lichen study in India is considered to be a neglected branch of botany and very few researchers are engaged in this work, a vast area of the country is remains unexplored for lichens. Therefore, my primary focus is to explore the unexplored areas of the country. Secondly, to creating awareness among common man and students regarding biodiversity, especially the importance lichens. Third, I am interested in producing skilled manpower (capacity building) in lichen taxonomy through series of training programs. Biogeography, biomonitoring and biodeterioration studies utilizing lichens and their bioprospecting are other area of my interest.

Background:
Karthick Balasubramanian is a Scientist at the Biodiversity and Palaeobiology Group, Agharkar Research Institute, Pune. He studied the community structure of streams of the Western Ghats for his Ph.D. He later in 2010 he joined Natural History Museum of the University of Colorado at Boulder for his postdoctoral research where he studied the taxonomy of endemic diatoms of the Indian subcontinent. In 2013 he joined the North-West University, South Africa to work on the endemic diatoms of Southern Africa. His laboratory is currently studying the diversity and distribution of diatoms across the Indian subcontinent and application of this information in the monitoring of water quality, paleoenvironment reconstruction, and environmental education. He had discovered more than 30 new species of diatoms from Africa, America, and Asia. He is also involved with environmental educational activities using diatoms as an educational tool. He writes science communication in Tamil focusing on biodiversity research.

Background:
Dr. Alok Jain is a computational biophysicist. He did bachelor in chemical engineering from Raipur in 2002. After his bachelor he joined the master’s program in the field of computational biology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He continued his Ph.D. research at the same institute and graduated in 2012. After his Ph.D. he worked as a post doctorate fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany and University of Konstanz, Germany for more than five years. Recently, he joined the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research Ahmedabad, India as an Assistant Professor. He has been awarded the prestigious Ramalingaswami Fellowship-2019. He has expertise in computational chemistry, structural bioinformatics, computational bio-nanotechnology, computational tissue engineering and structural biophysics. His current research interests lie primarily to design and characterization of nanoparticles for biomedical applications, identification and optimization of drug/lead compounds using various computational approaches and to understand protein structure-function relationship.

Background:
Dr. Manikandan Paranjothy's broad field of research interest is theoretical and computational chemistry. In my research group, we use direct classical trajectory simulation technique coupled with modern electronic structure theory to study interesting reactions that are relevant to biochemistry and astrochemistry. Specifically, my current research interests are unimolecular and intramolecular dynamics in the gas phase, ion-molecule collision reactions, organic reaction mechanisms, and collision induced dissociation of complex molecules.

Background:
Dr. Manju Sharma obtained her integrated masters degree in Chemistry from Dept. of Chemistry, Panjab University and was awarded PhD degree in Computational chemistry from SSCU, IISc, Bengaluru. Thereafter she gained postdoctoral experience from Department of Bio molecular and Chemical Engineering, UC Berkeley, CA, USA and Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT, Boston, USA. She is currently assistant professor in School of Chemistry, University of Hyderabad. Her areas of interest are prediction of biocompatible, green materials for pharmaceutical and petrochemical applications and major areas of interest are enhanced nucleation of drug polymorphs, carbon dioxide and methane capture and removal of organic impurities from water, prediction of novel biocompatible, selective hydrate promoters for CO2-CH4 exchange in gas hydrates using computational simulation techniques.

Background:
Ramachandran obtained his Ph.D from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2008. After working as a post-doctoral fellow in University of Perugia (Italy), The State University of New York at Buffalo (USA) and University of Ontario Institute of Technology (Canada), he joined as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in 2012. His research mainly focuses on the designing of materials for electronic, energy and environmental applications. His studies have shown that the optoelectronic properties of carbon nanostructures can be tuned by the endohedral or exohedral noncovalent functionalization. Recently, Ramachandran extended the concept of strong weak effective hydrogen bond model to fused water cages that enables one to investigate the properties of gas hydrates at reduced computational cost. His research group is also involved in the studies on the removal of environmentally hazardous gases by their sequestration in the form of gas hydrates via an exchange mechanism or by their adsorption and subsequent conversion to environmentally benign products using cost-effective materials. In a recent project, he is also exploring the area of molecular machines. He has published around fifty papers in internationally reputed journals. He has been also selected as Marqui’s Who is Who in the world.

Background:
Dr. Charu Lata is a Plant Molecular Biologist currently working as a Scientist and Assistant Professor at CSIR-National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, New Delhi-110067. Prior to it, she served as a Scientist at CSIR-Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow. Her research interest has been in the field of crop improvements especially abiotic stress responses and tolerance through functional genomics approaches especially transcriptomics, characterization of stress-responsive genes and small non-coding RNAs, and genome editing in important crops. Currently her group is working towards developing transgenic pearl millet, and chickpea for improved drought tolerance. She is a recipient of Young Scientist awards by INSA and NASI. She also received Indo-Australia EMCR Fellowship, INSPIRE Faculty Award, Jawaharlal Nehru Award for Outstanding Doctotal Thesis Research and numerous other awards. She is an Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru; a founding member of INYAS and a member of NASI.

Background:
Dr. Shivaprasad is an expert in the molecular analysis of plants including forward and reverse genetics, ChIP analysis, whole-genome methylation analysis, biotechnology, use of multiple model plants to study functions of small RNAs and epigenetics. He has developed patented technology to help breeders in using specific rice genes as markers for yield and lodging resistance. He is a recipient of EMBO Fellowship 2006 and Ramanujan Fellowship 2013. His lab is interested in understanding small RNA-mediated mechanisms in plants.

Background:
Dr. Raju is currently working as scientist in ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. He did his graduation in Agriculture from TamilNadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore. He had availed ICAR national talent fellowships (JRF and SRF) to complete my post-graduation and doctoral degrees in the subject of Plant Physiology at ICAR-IARI, New Delhi. After qualifying Agricultural Research Services (ARS), He had served as seed molecular biologist at ICAR-Indian Institute of Seed Sciences, Mau, U.P. for 7 years. Currently, posted at Nanaji Deshmukh Plant Phenomics Center, ICAR-IARI, New Delhi and involved in high throughput, non-destructive and precise phenotyping of crop plants.

Background:
Dr. Arun Bhardwaj joined Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) Ahmedabad Centre of Space Applications Centre (SAC) in July 1997. He worked here for more than 18 years on the development of space borne Electro-optical camera payload systems such as Very High Resolution Radiometers of INSAT-2E, INSAT-3A and Kalpnasat satellites used for Meteorological forecast, Cartosat series: Cartosat-1, Cartosat-2, Cartosat-2A, Cartosat-2B for high resolution imaging cameras. He has also worked on Resourcesat -1, Resourcesat-2 for mapping Earth resources, Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM) for Ocean studies, Chandrayaan-1 payloads and Mars Orbiter Mission, popularly called Mangalyaan. Since March 2016, He has been working in the office of Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India with focus on synergy projects. He is presently working on Sharing of Resources/Instruments of all Government funded Institutions and Departments under I-STEM (Indian Science Technology and Engineering facilities Map) and City Knowledge Clusters in various cities by bringing together Academia, R&D Labs and industry for bringing synergy.

Background:
Dr. Ranjit Kumar is working Faculty in the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Dayalbagh Educational Institute (Deemed University), Dayalbagh, Agra (India). His main research area is atmospheric science. He has successfully completed eight major research project funded by DST, UGC, CSIR, MHRD and ISRO-GBP. He is principal investigator of “Environmental Observatory” at Agra funded by ISRO-GBP. More than thirty nine research papers in National and International journals of repute and 70 papers in conferences/seminars and a number of National and International awards are in his credit. He was a visiting faculty in the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, USA in 2014.

Background:
Dr. Mandal is a Assistant executive director at Indian National Science Academy. She is also a part of the editorial staff of the journal “Proceedings of The Indian National Science Academy”.

Background:
Dr. Dhaka completed his PhD in Physics from UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research, Indore in the year 2008. Then he did his postdoc from Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics, Germany and Iowa State University, USA. He joined Deptt of Physics at IIT, Delhi as an Assistant Professor in 2014. He has visited universities in Switzerland, Australia and Germany as Visiting/Guest Scientist.

Background:
Rohini Garg is currently working as Assistant Professsor at Department of Life Sciences at Shiv Nadar University. The focus of her research interests is plant epigenomics to uncover the epigenetic diversity in crop plants and its role in interaction of plants with its environment. Her lab also studies the role of DNA secondary structures in interaction with various proteins. She is reciepient of INSPIRE Faculty Award, IYBA award, INSA Young Scientist Award, NASI Young scientist award, associate of Indian Academy of Sciences and SERB Women excellence award.

Background:
She is a Postdoctoral researcher working at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on studying carbon concentration mechanism in algae to identify potential means of engineering higher plants with enhanced photosynthetic efficiencies. Her previous research experiences are in the area of protein folding and design, and mechanisms of chaperone action.

Background:
Dr. Kiranjot Kaur is working as RA in Mechanical department, IIT Ropar and currently working on FP5 project of TIGR2ESS. She has done B. tech and M. tech with distinction and has 3 years of industrial experience in quality and inspection department.