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.

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).