National Frontiers of Science (NatFoS) Meeting 2019

Speaker 1: Gyan Swaraj: Promoting the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge in India
Dr. Carl Malamud
President, Public.Resource.Org

Academia and Industry are two different worlds which operate differently but still support each other. Both have different purposes and different ideologies. However, with growing economy, India is also witnessing the growth of education sector which is one of the compelling reason for these two different worlds to come together to address and solve some of the real-world challenges. This will also ensure the job-readiness of the graduates as per the requirement of Indian Industry. Besides some old yet still relevant suggestions such as revision and alignment of curriculum with Industry requirements, industry exposure, Govt. of India has established a large number of startup incubators where young students and researchers are given an opportunity to share and test their innovative ideas. This session will highlight some of these efforts for building an ecosystem for the Startups and interact openly with potential incubates who are leading researchers in various universities, IITs, IISc, IISERs and other research laboratories. In this session, there will be two invited lectures followed by a panel discussion and Q&A session. Panelists include representatives of AGNII, Niti Ayog, Business Incubators and CEO of Startups to share their knowledge and experience.

Speaker 1: Translating young minds: Thinking Beyond
Dr. Mrutyunjay Suar
Chief Executive, KIIT-TBI
Moderator:
Dr. Chandra Shekhar Sharma
Director, Restyro Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Panelists:
1. Dr. Mrutyunjay Suar, Chief Executive, KIIT-TBI
2. Dr. Biren Banerjee, Founder, Director at inDNA Life Sciences Pvt Ltd
3. Dr. Ruchi Saxena , India Flying Labs (Indian Startup)
4. Mr. Manu Kohli, Cogniable (Indian Startup)
5. Mr. Himanshu Mehlawat, Co –founder and CEO, Intraversity

Complex natural and technological systems permeate many aspects of everyday life—including human brain intelligence, medical science, social science, biology, economics, even our personal and professional relationships. The past decade has seen enormous intensification of research into structural and dynamical properties of complex networks, purely on account of the simple fact that they exist everywhere in nature; Many complex networks are part of our daily life.

This session of FOS is dedicated to the perpetually expanding research on complex networks in various areas of science, from sub-atomic levels to the level of environment and our planet. The main focus of the session is to explore two fundamental issues associated with the research on complex networks; Firstly, to understand whether networks are controllable; and secondly to understand various strategies that are being employed across disciplines to control networks, when they are controllable. We will also discuss emerging tools like Artificial Intelligence and Deep neural networks to explore nature and the environment. Overall, this session will identify unifying principles across the diverse fields/applications at the interface of network theory and artificial intelligence.

The session will bring together national experts on biomolecular networks at microscopic levels such as genetic regulation networks, protein networks, neuronal networks in quantum physics. On the other side of this scale are large macro scale networks currently being explored via artificial intelligence and deep neural networks (e.g. social networks, scientific collaborations and disease spread), all the way to modelling the phytochemical landscape in ecological networks. The session aims to reveal how all these networks, very different in scale and nature, share similar structural properties, and how this simple detail has made it possible to create mathematical models to understand and to explain the topological and dynamical properties of complex systems around us in everyday life.

Speakers & Talk Titles:

Biomaterials play a vital role in maintaining and improving human health and are routinely encountered in our everyday lives in the form of prosthetic knees, contact lenses, dental implants and drug carriers. Intended to interface with biological systems, biomaterials are typically used to evaluate, treat, augment or replace any tissue, organ or function in the human body. In the last several years, the advent of nanotechnology, developments in material fabrication technology, improvements in measurement and material characterization tools, emergence of –omics approaches and an improved ability to probe cell responses over a range of spatio-temporal scales have all led to the development of materials with advanced functionality that can dynamically modulate complex biological systems. Furthermore, advances in computational and systems biology approaches are increasingly being used to understand how materials interact with cells/tissues in health and disease, and these insights are further used to improve the design and fabrication of materials used in healthcare applications. Some notable applications of engineered materials in biology and medicine include stealth materials that can evade immune responses, immunotherapeutic materials that can target/modulate the host immune system, smart materials that can promote tissue regeneration, degradable materials that can delivery payloads in a controlled manner and nanomaterials that serve as theragnostic vehicles.

All of the above-mentioned advances and applications make biomaterials a very exciting area of research that can help address several current and future healthcare needs. Given their wide range of applications, engineered interventional materials in medicine can significantly improve diagnosis and treatment modalities, while promoting longer, safer and healthier lives. Within India, the biomaterials community is very vibrant and is engaged in exciting work covering all aspects from the bench (i.e., fundamental) to the bedside (i.e., translational). Our session in the Frontiers of Science meeting aims to highlight some of this work, and also provide a common platform for young researchers working in this field to network and interact with scientists from other interdisciplinary fields. We hope that these interactions will result in new paradigms and help shed light on hitherto unexplored avenues that will greatly benefit the biomaterials community at large.

Speakers:

Behavioral ecology as a field of research has been inexistent for several decades. India has diverse habitats, from rain forests to dry deciduous forests, mangroves to hot and cold deserts, coastal ecosystems to flood plains, which include four biodiversity hotspots. In spite of the rich biodiversity of our country, research on ecology, behavior and related fields has progressed slowly in this part of the world.

Fortunately, behavioral ecology is emerging as an attractive field of research in India in the recent years, with many young researchers taking keen interest in native Indian species and exploring them using modern methods of research. Today, climate change is no longer a concern for the future but a reality of the present and the world is facing threats like water and energy crisis, lack of food security, re-emergence of various diseases and increasing human-animal conflict arising from rapid habitat loss. It has become imperative to understand our environment and to work towards protecting it.

Behavioral ecology as a field of research has a wide canopy, which houses various sub-disciplines and can be highly interdisciplinary in its approach to a problem.

This session aims to bring together young Indian researchers working on different aspects of behavioral ecology, using different model systems, for brainstorming on this fast-growing field of research in India.

Speakers:

Extreme environments on the planet earth have spurred curiosity of countless natural historians and intrepid explorers since time immemorial, including Alexander von Humboldt, Roald Amundsen, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Earnest Shackleton and so on. Such explorations have resulted in a number of crucial scientific discoveries and overarching theories of basic science; theory of natural selection propounded by Darwin and Wallace being a prime example- a paradigm shift that leveraged advancement of unrelated scientific disciplines. Planet Earth's extreme terrains, such as Antarctica, Arctic, Himalayan glaciers, deserts, ocean trenches, volcanoes, and hydrothermal vents, etc., are important places for curiosity-driven scientific research for many reasons. First, because of its extreme terrain, exploration is exceedingly challenging, and thus such environments remain some of the planet's least explored regions. Because physico-chemical stress is extraordinary, life forms at these locations have developed unique mechanisms to cope with stress— a potential avenue for future bioprospecting efforts, including that for unique biochemical and genetic resources that are responsible for stress tolerance. Moreover, in these extreme environments, life forms provide clues about the very origin of life on our planet, an event that happened ca. four billion years ago. Extremophiles also illuminate the field of exobiology, the search for life throughout the universe. Extremely cold planet earth environments, including montane ecosystems, tundra biomes, polar ice caps and high-altitude glaciers, are some of the most affected places on planet earth due to global warming, and research on such environments plays a key role in documenting and mitigating climate change.

Despite its crucial importance, the exploration and research efforts on planet Earth's extreme environments were rather minimal in India, which is a major yet often overlooked challenge currently facing Indian Science. The Antarctic program of India began in 1980, while the Arctic program began in 2008. Several Indian scientists have made outstanding contributions to research at extreme environments, including Padma Bhushan awardee Syed Zahoor Quasim, Bhatnagar Awardees Hassan Nasseim Siddiquie, N Balakrishnan Nair, Kolluru Sree Krishna, Prem Chand Pandey, Satish Ramnath Shetye, P. N. Vinayachandran, Shankar Doraiswamy and so on.

Proposed in this unique networking session, some of the outstanding scientists involved in transdisciplinary research on extreme environments, including those from biology, chemistry, physics, and earth sciences, are brought together. Dialogs between promising young researchers and internationally renowned intellects from contrasting disciplines will be fostered across domains. As part of this session, conceptualization of white paper with reference to the future of research on neglected extreme environments that have ramifications during the framing of future national scientific policies will be formulated.

Speakers:

Session Chair:
Dr. Felix Bast
School of Basic and Applied Sciences, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda

Session Co-chair:
Dr. Jitendra Pattanaik
School of Environment and Earth Sciences, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda

Computational chemistry that started in the 60s studying molecules containing very few atoms has tremendously progressed into a matured field capable of handling large biomolecules. Many predictions from these computational results have led experiments and together have advanced the knowledge about molecular structures, interactions long and short range, self-assembly and new alloys. Besides finding a niche in applied areas researchers are constantly working on improving the theoretical framework, invent new functionals, basis sets and methodologies to study the molecules. In this session we will look at six distinct areas of computational chemistry viz studying non-covalent interactions, self-assembly, reaction mechanism, molecular dynamics, surface phenomena and metal clusters.

This session will be focused on both the development of theoretical framework to understand molecules/materials as well as advanced computational approaches to elucidate hitherto unknown properties of matter.

Speakers:

Global climate change is anticipated to be the one of the most devastating threats to agricultural production and productivity worldwide. Climate change together with the rapidly increasing population is mounting considerable pressure on agriculture sector to produce more food from less land. This has compelled plant scientists to develop climate resilient crops with not only improved tolerance to various abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, cold, salinity, etc., and diseases but also with enhanced productivity. Modification of endogenous plant pathways, often by manipulation of important regulatory factors, for instance, transcription factors, small RNAs and stress responsive genes as well as detailed studies on epigenetic changes may help in achieving tolerance to abiotic stresses. Further, ‘Omics’ technologies appear to be promising tools for deciphering the stress responsiveness of economically important crops or their wild relatives by enabling rapid identification and selection of novel beneficial genes/alleles/QTLs underlying these traits and their controlled incorporation into the desired germplasm. Moreover, in the era of robotics, and advanced information technology, various smart tools and technologies such as drones, AI, high throughput phenomics and digital agriculture will be extremely useful in safeguarding the future through improved global food security.

Application of these technologies for developing climate resilient crops thus offers great potential to increase food production in coming years. Rapid and continued advances in these areas will further assist in circumventing the challenge of continued food production in the era of global climate change.

This session aims to bring together young scientists from both academia and industry working on diverse areas of genomics, phenomics, stress biology, robotics and information technology in India together for networking and brainstorming session in the proposed FoS meeting along with researchers from interdisciplinary areas.

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