Mriganka Sur is the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT. He has also acted as the jury chair for the Infosys Prize in the field of life sciences for the past several years. IndiaBioscience recently had the opportunity to chat with him about the current status of life science research in India, some of the common challenges, and the road ahead for the community. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

With several new COVID variants emerging in recent months, the importance of analysing and drawing insights from vast amounts of viral genome sequencing data cannot be understated. To address this need, A team of researchers at the Advanced Centre for Treatment Research & Education in Cancer (ACTREC), Navi Mumbai, have come up with a computational tool called the Infectious Pathogen Detector (IPD).

Jaishree Subrahmanium is a botanist who did her PhD in ecological genomics from the French National Institute of Agricultural Research. She has been working with Lotus STEMM, a Canadian NGO working on representing South Asian women in STEM careers, where she established a mental health support community -‘Paksh’. We spoke with Jaishree about her experience with this initiative and lessons from the same.

Sarah Iqbal leads the Communications and Public Engagement division at DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, which is an independent public charity that funds research in health and biomedical sciences in India. In this interview, which was first published on Editage Insights, Iqbal touches upon several interesting facets, including the fascinating idea of how science and art are intricately linked.

Sadhana Joshi is a Distinguished Professor and Head, Mother and Child Health Division in Interactive Research School for Health Affairs (IRSHA) of Bharati Vidyapeeth (Deemed to be University), Pune. She has been working tirelessly in the field of maternal nutrition for close to 30 years. Her lab currently works on preeclampsia, a kind of hypertension in pregnant women that has dire effects on maternal and fetal health if not taken care of in due time.