In this conversation, Vid Nukala, Senior Community Engagement Officer and Head - Government Relations, Global Activities at EMBO, Heidelberg, discusses the interplay between science and policy, the key actors and issues in science policy, and how researchers can get involved in science policy.

Anuradha Lohia is currently the Vice-Chancellor of the Presidency University, Kolkata. She served as the founding Chief Executive Officer of the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance from 2009-2012. She is the recipient of several prestigious national and international grants and awards. In this interview, she chats with IndiaBioscience about her thoughts on leadership.

Tamal Das is the Head of the Collective Cellular Dynamics (CCD) Lab at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Hyderabad. He has been awarded the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) grant for the year 2022. In this interview, Tamal discusses his work and how his team won the HFSP funding.

Mahesh Sankaran is Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru where he heads the Community and Ecosystems Ecology lab. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2021 for Life Sciences, the first ecologist to have won this prestigious award. In this interview, he talks about his work on grasslands and climate change, and on winning the Infosys Prize. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is currently the director of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata. Among other accolades, she received the Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science in 2017 and was the second woman scientist to receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences (2010). We recently had the opportunity to chat with her regarding her thoughts on leadership.