Congratulations on getting the EMBO-YIP fellowship. Can you tell us a bit about it?

The EMBO Young Investigators Program (YIP) allows my laboratory to access the top-notch experimental facilities e.g. cryo-EM available at EMBL. It also provides an excellent opportunity for networking with many young group leaders from different countries working on a variety of cutting-edge research problems. It is a unique platform to forge new collaborations and carry out interdisciplinary science. I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of the EMBO network.

How do you plan to utilise your access to these top-notch research facilities? How will it help your research?

We are focused on the direct structural characterisation of highly challenging membrane proteins and their signalling complexes, GPCRs in particular. We require access to sophisticated facilities like cryo-EM, micro-focused x-ray beamlines and x-ray free electron laser (x-FEL) to generate structural snapshots of our signalling complexes. These facilities are not available (or at least not fully functional) in India yet. Therefore, I am very excited that the students and fellows in my laboratory will be able to access these facilities at EMBL in Heidelberg and Hamburg. We plan to ship our samples (like purified proteins, protein crystals) and then either do remote data collection or be there in person to analyse our samples.

In your Nature interview, you said, “we have to make discoveries and not just publish papers”. The current scenario may not always be conducive to taking this path. How does one work around the pressure to ‘publish or perish’?

Well, it continues to be a battle in the Indian context where people seem to put a lot of weight on quantity over quality. But, I think a change in the mindset is happening slowly. There are funding agencies, for example, the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance, that recognise and support excellence and cutting-edge science in India. I think one can draw motivation from the fact that good science done in India is being recognised more and more at the international level.

When applying for grants, researchers are often assessed based on the number of papers they’ve published. What alternative metrics can be used for such assessments, especially in the Indian context?

I think this number game is indeed killing us at multiple levels. We should clearly put the emphasis on the importance of the scientific question one is trying to address and the likely impact of the outcomes. We can identify key research areas where India lacks a global presence, and put more effort on them. For example, structural biology of membrane proteins has been one such niche area, and a few of us actively engaged in this research domain have been making a case with funding agencies. Thankfully, DBT has now recognised it and announced a focused call for proposals on this topic. We clearly need more initiatives like this.

You had the opportunity to work with three Nobel Laureates. How did they influence the scientist in you?

I think that the most important thing I learnt from them is to focus on big questions and address the research problems that have the potential to shape the future direction of the field. I have been fortunate to see closely how passionate and invested these people are about their research and that has been the key to their success. I try to pass on the same philosophy to the students and fellows in my laboratory, and I am absolutely delighted to see that they subscribe to it.

What is your advice to students who have faced failures during their scientific journey? Maybe you can share your own experience on how you deal with them.

Well, failure is an integral part of our trade. If we succeed at most things that we try, then it means that perhaps we are not working on challenging problems. I think the key is to learn something even from the failed experiments and integrate that information in designing the next experiment to be able to have a better shot. The beauty of science is that you never know where it will take you. So, one should have patience, perseverance and an open mind. It is also crucial to always keep eyes open for new leads, hints and indications that might turn into important breakthroughs.

How do you scale your decision to come back to India? How easy has it been?

Well, the decision to come back was easy because I always had this in the back of my mind. The key was to land in the right place. An institution where excellence is recognised, appreciated, nurtured and promoted. And, IIT Kanpur has been an incredible place to start an independent career. Thankfully, the funding agencies like Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance have appreciated and supported the research program in my laboratory. I can say without hesitation that working with superbly talented, incredibly hard working and tremendously motivated students and fellows has been the best part of the journey so far. Looking back, it also gives me an immense sense of satisfaction that our work in the last few years has put India on the international map of structural biology of membrane proteins, GPCRs in particular.

There are a lot of things in the system that need to be fixed and issues that need be addressed in order for us to do truly cutting-edge science in India. But clearly, there has been a positive swing in the right direction over the last few years, and the future is bright. The pace of research is slower compared to the West due to delays associated with procuring the reagents and lack of some key infrastructure but I believe that a careful reorganisation of the research funding landscape can help us offset some of these limitations. I personally think that being one among many leaders in a particular domain is not enough; we have to dominate at the international level, at least in some research areas. We have been playing catch up for too long. It is time now for us to lead globally and show the way.

What do you think it takes to click as a student or a scientist?

I think the most important things are passion, focus and curiosity. One has to work hard, be aware of the latest developments in the field, and have a pulse on where the field is headed. I also believe that one has to be ambitious and have a tad of aggression to be globally competitive and do cutting-edge research. It also helps to shield yourself from surrounding mediocrity and not get sucked into it; the temptation, as you can imagine, is high.

What is Sattva MedTech about and why did you start this company?

We are a 3-year-old company, currently building our first product, Fetal Lite – an ECG based fetal heart rate monitor. The current standard for monitoring heart rate is ultrasound-based, which is not advanced or effective for a variety of conditions. We are trying to move the technology from being reliant on Doppler effect to ECG, which is a lot more accurate and reliable. Our device captures signals, both from the foetus and uterine contractions from the mother in a non-invasive manner.

My co-founder and I are from BITS Pilani, Goa and have family members in the medical field. The inclination to start a company in the med-tech sector was always there, but the idea got cemented at the end of an entrepreneurship course at our college. Initially, we were ideating and applying for a few grants at different incubation centres. We moved to Bangalore as soon as we were awarded our first seed grant from BITS 75 Charitable Trust.

What competitive advantage does your product have over others in the market?

The ultrasound technology suffers from a major drawback of manually optimising the position of the probe to be able to record heart rate. If the user is not accurate in positioning the probe, it is difficult to obtain an appropriate signal.

Since our technology is based on ECG which travels throughout the abdomen, no matter where the probe is, the signal always gets captured. In addition, the probe has multiple sensors instead of a single one. This circumvents any issues of probe orientation and signal acquisition such that the signal to noise ratio is much higher. Third, our device tackles one of the major issues in the med-tech sector, which is, lack of skill. Most nurses are not experienced or trained well enough to ensure the reliability of tests and accurate reading of results of heart rate monitoring. By removing the skill aspects, we reduce the time required for diagnosis and ensure better health outcomes for the mother and the baby. Lastly, there are no low-cost ECG based monitors in the Indian market. There are two global competitors outside India that use similar technology, but these were developed in the US and UK and designed mainly from the perspective of a western user. So they haven’t addressed the skill dependency in Indian segment. Their cost also runs up to 3-4 times that of a local device (Sattva’s device). To sum up, our whole focus is that our device should be skill independent, easy to use while being as reliable as possible.

What are the requirements that need to be addressed to enable a faster transition of a startup from an incubatee to a successful company?

We have just started commercialising our device. Based on our experiences, I think one of the main drawback of the Indian system is lack of availability of ready statistics. We don’t do a lot of data collection in our country, whether free or paid, in the public or private sector. For example, a simple figure, like the number of ECG machines, or the number of NST-CTG (Fetal Non-Stress Test-Cardiotocography) machines sold in India is not known. This kind of information is not only needed for someone who plans to market their device but is also important for the overall healthcare sector of the country. People in developed countries don’t face these problems, so it is much easier for them to analyse the market and build devices. I don’t know if this gap can be filled by a private entity or should the government step in.

Based on the trends we are seeing in medtech, going forward, big data is going to play a very big role - in terms of patient trends, patterns and preventive healthcare.

Was attracting interest from doctors and investors difficult?

We were lucky that we got a medtech focused investor early on in our company life. During the first six months, we got invited to incubate in one of India’s leading medical accelerator called InnAccel. It was here that we got our first push to learn how to interact with doctors. Once we crossed that barrier, it was just a matter of perseverance. We also acquired a grant from the Millennium Alliance (MA), which is a partnership between USAID and Govt. of India.

How did the bottlenecks you faced helped shape product development at Sattva?

In terms of technology, one of the biggest learning curve we faced was that the speed of iterations in building hardware is much slower than software development, where you can do debugging quickly. For us, after (seeing) every single patient, we had to sit back and do a thorough analysis of what went wrong and solve as much of it is as possible. We tried to ensure that we got the product development right in the very first iteration.

One of the other challenges was access to patients. In general, getting access to patients in India is not that difficult when compared to the western world. However, due to the sensitivity associated with pregnancy, mothers would get hesitant to give permission to test the initial prototype of our device. This led to the realisation that our product was built from the point of view of an engineer. We needed to keep the patient’s perspective in mind and build it in a way that it looked safe, and the patient is comfortable using it. This led us to hire a product designer early on, even before we had fully established the technology.

What kind of product iterations occurred during this phase?

Our initial concept was a home care device, where an expecting mother could use it at home herself. During the course of interactions with doctors and (med-tech device) distributors, we realised that an at-home device may not be feasible idea especially in the event of a complication. The safer approach for the patient would be to reach a clinic or a hospital. We took that shift in our strategy about a year and a half back. Instead of making it compatible with different types of smart devices, as was our approach initially, we decided to bundle a dedicated tablet with our product. This would also allow more computational power needed for data analysis. The data can be captured wirelessly and shared with other doctors on the fly as well.

Where do you see the company in the next 5 years?

We are excited about formally launching our device by the end of this year as we received the CE (Conformité Européene) certification for our device just last month.Now that we have set up an end to end development process and a capable team we want to accelerate our growth. We are interested in creating a whole portfolio of devices for the unmet clinical needs of India. In this regard, we are looking to expand our team and test new ideas. Our goal is to have at least two ideas in the pipeline by the end of the next year, at a prototype or clinical validation stage and one more that is at ideation stage.

The choice of vertigo is quite unconventional. What influenced your team to tackle this ailment?

Choice of vertigo might sound unconventional since people don't look at it as a lifestyle disease. But, there are two aspects of the problem (vertigo), that are quite relevant. First, from the point of view of just numbers, the disease is quite prevalent. Chronic sufferers in the US are 1 in 20 and these numbers are similar across the world. The second and more important aspect is that at the end of the day, vertigo is essentially a symptom. What causes these symptoms though, is of greater interest to the medical community and important for the patient as well. Anything can cause dizziness. It can be a simple variation in blood pressure, a cardiac issue or other vestibular or neurological reasons. While cardiological reasons are pretty well defined and can be tackled, or at least identified at a physician level, vestibular and neurological reasons are difficult to diagnose. Between these two causes, it is very important to narrow down what exactly is leading to dizziness. If the cause is vestibular, then the treatment path would be less aggressive, would involve more of medication and physiotherapy and surgery in very rare cases. But if the cause is more neurological, then a more focused effort is required with both surgical and non-surgical intervention. Our device primarily helps clinicians narrow down on what exactly is causing dizziness. This makes a huge difference, as the sooner one figures out what is wrong (with the patient), the better it is.

What are the different products that your company is building?

We launched our first product- Balance Eye– this year in March and have got a good initial traction. We have completed 50 plus installations, till now. We have a presence in 26 cities across 3 countries. We are also working on the next generation of the same device as well as a couple of other products – one is in the screening space and the other one is for rehabilitation.

Your website also mentions wearable eyeglasses and Internet of Things. Can you tell us about them?

The wearable glass is essentially to capture data pertaining to episodic neurological events as they occur. So, while, the current device is more for clinical assessment, the wearable glasses are more for capturing real-time episodic data.

And, this involves eye tracking and measuring other physiological parameters from the patient’s body?

Correct. Even our current product, Balance Eye, is predominantly based on eye tracking.

What was the cost difference between other commercially available eye trackers and the one you built? How well has your tracker been received in the market?

On an average, our device costs four-times less than other eye trackers available in and Europe. Apart from the cost, there are other competitive advantages that our product offers. For example, several other eye trackers require specific, dedicated infrastructure, light settings and complicated system of interpreting the results. We have simplified all of this to a great extent allowing for easy diagnosis anywhere. Our users have also indicated that the low price of our product coupled with technical support and training backup from our side makes it easier to get this device in their clinics. We are fortunate to have identified this sweet spot. At any given point of time we have 7-8 pending installations, so we are mostly focusing on fulfilling the back orders.

What does the team at Cyclops look like?

We have 10 employees now, including the co-founding team. The co-founders comprise of myself and two doctors, Srinivas and Ravi Nayar. Both are ENT specialists. Srinivas handles most of product innovation and development. Since our approach towards product development is more from the perspective of medical needs rather than technological capabilities, everything that we have designed is based entirely on years of clinical expertise. We address the gaps identified from the umpteen number of interviews and discussion with clinicians. Then, we have a team of engineers specialising in computer vision and image processing, led by Ajith Rao, our software architect. They develop most of the image processing and pupil tracking algorithms. That entire team sits here in Bangalore. I drive business development, channel partnerships and strategic planning. Our CTO, Shekar Tippur is based out of San Diego in the USA. His team is building our machine learning modules and our entire cloud backbone.

Please talk about the challenges you faced in starting Cyclops, not just from the technological perspective, but also on the business side.

Most of the challenges we faced were operational in nature, such as getting the right set of resources, hardware designing, getting access to the right set of prototyping opportunities and then acquiring talent in those spaces. We also struggled with access to components and funds. As far as product functionality was concerned, we didn’t really face too many issues. Thankfully, we haven’t faced many issues with getting the interpupillary distance right in our tracker. This is because we have designed a universal goggle which fits all facial contours and all faces. It required quite a few iterations to get that as well as the angulation of the camera in the correct configuration. This is unlike other systems where camera parts are movable.

What kind of technical feedback did you get from doctors who used your prototype equipment?

During our pilot phase, a lot of changes were recommended by the doctors, but having two doctors in the co-founding team, meant that we had already anticipated most of the suggestions. I would say, there weren’t any suggestions for a major modification. but most recommendations were related to ergonomics and functionality. For example, initially, we had a strap made of elastic and velcro. We replaced that with silicone strap.

What kind of help and support has Cyclops been able to get from its advisors?

If you get the right advisors on board, they are of immense help. In our case, Shyam Vasudev Rao, who is a medical doctor and the founder of Forus Health (P) Ltd, is one of our primary advisors and mentors. Being from the industry and having done extensive work in eye based imaging, he brought in a lot of connects and network. He helped us identify and outsource our manufacturing partners and also helped us with our very initial team.

You have raised seed round money. How did it help?

The money we raised helped us complete development of our first product.We are sustaining on revenues for the last 5-6 months and getting closer to our desired revenue mark.

What are your immediate strategies from here?

As I mentioned earlier, we have two new products in the development pipeline. For Balance Eye, we are aggressively looking at scaling up sales in India as well as the ASEAN region.We are focusing heavily on channel partnerships. In fact, we just signed our distribution partner in India. On the operations side, whenever we go for an installation, we train both the clinician (ENT specialist) and the technician. Earlier, the entire test procedure and interpretation of results were dependent on the clinicians. We have segregated that a bit. We have made the entire process of testing extremely simple, so, even a technician can run the test. Clinicians can now focus only on interpreting the results which can free up a lot of their time.

How did you first conceive the idea of making a device for screening hearing impairment?

About 5 years back, I was a part of this fellowship program called the Stanford India Biodesign. During that program I spent almost a year at Stanford and then came back to All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, to understand unmet clinical needs of India. I am not from a medical background so during my stay at AIIMS, I spent a lot of time shadowing doctors and nurses who go to some of the community centres and tried to find problems they face in general. These could be from the point of view of a physician, a service provider or even someone who does imaging. At one of the child development clinics, a parent from Hisar walked in with his 5-year-old son and told the doctors that his son doesn’t speak. After examining the child, the doctor concluded that his inability to speak stemmed from his inability to hear. Since the condition was not diagnosed at a younger age when brain plasticity is maximum, the doctor was unable to help the child. He said it was already too late for intervention like hearing aids or cochlear implants.

That was a very insightful moment for me. A bit of research also revealed that hearing screening is not provided en-masse in India. This is unlike the west, where babies get screened for hearing disorders at the time of birth and a proper intervention is provided early on. So, this was the trigger point that led to the idea of Sohum.

You said that your background was not medical but Sohum depends on collecting the auditory evoked potentials from the brainstem. How did you bridge that gap to build your technology?

I studied electrical engineering at college and then did a masters in design from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, so of course, I had to take a lot of help (from biologists). I visited almost every institute that is connected to audiology or provides related services. I went to All India Institute of Speech and Hearing Mysore initially. Then I went to Manipal Audiology Centre and spent a lot of time interacting with the experts. Most of the biology-related learning happened there. I also understood why despite us having these institutions, we are not able to provide hearing screening as a modality at birth.

Can you elaborate on that? Why such a gap exists?

I think it is a stakeholder issue. This is something which should fall under paediatricians’ bucket. They should be making parents aware of this condition, just the way they make them aware about vaccinations. Doctors in tier–I city inform parents of the need for hearing screening, but this information isn’t passed down to the underprivileged. Part of the reason is that they don’t have facilities to screen babies. Most available technologies are prohibitive in cost, require disposables, maybe an extra burden on the parents or may not even work in noisy settings. So there is a technology and a product gap for the have-nots, making the availability of screening unsuitable in these resource-constrained settings.

What bottlenecks did you face at different stages of product development–conception of the idea, designing the product and marketing it?

The market is not entirely ready for startups so developing such a technology is full of challenges. The product has to be state of the art and competitive with similar technologies from across the world. This requires a meditative effort as you need to have resources, an understanding of time, methods to prove your technology in the right way, understand the market needs and ensure funding acquisition etc. So it is an intense affair with a lot of hurdles. I was fortunate to get some support because of my association with Stanford India Biodesign and AIIMS. But in India, there is in general very limited support. Innovation is still not a big part of the ecosystem, where people take a leap of faith and build something on their own. So hiring good candidates from top places like IITs or IISc is tough and expensive. You need a good network that can get you in touch with the right kind of people. Even HR is not well groomed to look at the problem from a holistic point of view. As a result, the ecosystem forces you to undergo many experiments to get one thing right.

Which brings me to the next question, what constitutes the best team for a startup?

It is difficult to know who is the right person, but there have to be 2-3 core people in the company who are experts at their job. It is hard to find people who have a background in audiology innovation. So you knock at many doors to get that one right person. In India e-portals or seminars don’t offer that great an avenue to connect. Physical presence, networking, being on your toes and thinking on your feet helps get you that person.

How did you approach the business strategy?

One of my advisors told me long back that the job of an entrepreneur is not to take risk, but to mitigate it. So I have tried to take the path where a problem could be solved in the easiest way. We collaborated with multiple partners, like Medtronic India, and other channel partners to take their expertise in successfully marketing our product. They already have people working in this area, so there was no need to reinvent the wheel.

What has been the feedback to the screening device? How easy or tough has its adoption in the market been?

We are segmenting our market into four categories– maternity homes, paediatricians, ENT doctors and audiologists. The device is proving to be a boon for audiologists as they did not have a tool to detect hearing impairments till now. We are leasing out the device to them as well as to local entrepreneurs who in turn provide hearing detection as a service on behalf of Sohum. This approach is also useful in creating jobs at local level. The audiologists who were just providing hearing aids will now also be spreading the message of newborn screening to maternity homes, paediatricians, clinics and many other places like their own camps. So they are acting as our partners in spreading the word about Sohum as a screening and diagnostic device.

Could you tell us about the global reach of Sohum?

131 million babies are born every year across the world. Out of which 90% are born in the developing world. At present, there are no modalities to screen these children when they are born. So most of our queries are from the developing world. For example, we have 2 devices installed at Guatemala. They were quite curious about the device and technology as there is only one audiologist in entire Guatemala. Then there are our neighbours like Nepal who have enquired about the product as well. We want to create a full care cycle in these markets and not just an avenue for screening, so we are looking at the right kind of partners to associate with.

Your device was recently launched by Department of Biotechnology. Readers would love to know more about that.

It was the Department of Biotechnology that sponsored my training at Stanford India Biodesign and the AIIMS fellowship program. They were essentially the assignees for the IP of the product, which was further licensed out to my company. So they were involved in the whole process of inventing our device. The launch was their proposal. It provided us with a good platform for product outreach and authentication and we are building on that further. Many state governments have enquired about the device. Some agreed to use it in their universal hearing screening initiative.

What is next in the pipeline for Sohum?

Our device is based on a bio-signaling platform. This technology is not a focus area for many companies, so, there is a potential for products based on similar technology. Problems related to sleep cycle disruption, collecting ECG or EEG signals for issues related to morbidity or mortality etc could be future areas of application.

Can you tell us more about the first product you build and how did you come up with its idea?

We used to go to rural camps while I was at St. John’s Medical College at the ENTdepartment doing my postgraduate training. We would take a mirror and put around a headlight to see patients voice box while looking at its reflection in the mirror. It is an age-old technique for diagnosis and inexperienced doctors, like I was at that time, would struggle to see the vocal cord. I felt a need for more magnified images to be able to pick early cancer lesions. At St. John’s Medical College, we had a very nice endoscopy system that produced magnified images. For me, the question was why can’t we have a camera-based system in the rural area and not rely so much on these mirrors that fog up, are very small and difficult to use. That is what first spurned the idea of having a low cost camera and creating a mechanical coupler which can attach to any endoscope. I bought an off the shelf camera for about Rs. 10000 and got a mechanical engineer to make a small attachment device for the camera that could hold any endoscope.

What was the cost difference between the clinically available system in the market and the device that you had built?

The entire endoscopy system at the hospital cost about Rs. 2 lakhs, then. With the same quality of image, the manufacturing cost of my device with the camera and the coupler was below Rs. 15000.

What was your experience in taking this product to the market?

There was a lot of struggle in the beginning, especially since I was a part time doctor. You can come up with an idea and can make a proof of concept, but you don't really have the background and expertise to raise or spend the kind of money which is needed to take the product to the market. I could not take my initial company called Yukti Medical Innovations beyond a point. So, we hired a design firm and an electronics engineering team and spent one year trying to raise money, which did not work out too. Then, using our own savings, we made a refined prototype of my device that could be used on patients and licensed out the product to the design firm itself. After Yukti, I got selected for a fellowship program called Stanford India BioDesign (SIB) where I learned how to invent and understand the market well. My mistake was that the prototype was built from a doctor’s point of view whereas I needed to design it for rural usage where there are no ENT doctors.The device got redesigned one more time to meet the needs of health workers in the rural market.This time in collaboration with a design firm called Icarus. Eventually, a larger company called Medtronic bought the license. Marketing it as ENTraview, they have screened over 300,000 patients for ear infections till now.

As a SIB fellow, what did you learn about the process of innovation?

I learnt to have realistic expectations in any scenario. Normally when you are inventing, you don’t know what to expect. You are just taking one step after the other and you deal with situations on a case to case basis. At SIB I learnt to see the entire roadmap in advance – to have a sense of the kind of resources you will need, the time, money and the commitment it would take to make a product into reality. The second thing SIB taught me was the importance of working in teams. That was my million dollar lesson from the program. I understood I cannot be a designer, an engineer, a business person and a lawyer, all at the same time. As a doctor, I initially thought I could be (everything). Once I understood the amount of effort required to take the product to an industrial level, in terms of design, quality &standard, manufacturing, human factor, safety analysis and regulatory requirements, I realised I am better off sticking to the doctor domain. I learnt to work with teams that are cross-disciplinary, rather than trying to own that entire knowledge and do it myself. Now, I limit myself to giving clinical inputs and validation. This has also helped me work with multiple teams and develop multiple products.

You belong to a small tribe of medical practitioners who’ve transitioned from being a doctor to an innovator. Tell us about the challenges you faced in this transition.

One was communicating with members in a cross-disciplinary team. Though I understood the clinical part well, articulating and explaining it to non-clinical team members like engineers and design team wasn’t easy. I would only come to know about the problems once the product was ready and realise belatedly that the engineers didn’t get the full requirements right, like in terms of dimensions etc. The second thing was to raise money. There are a lot of things that are considered by the investors and governments when you want to raise money for product development. So, even though money is available, the process is not easy if you don’t know how to go about it. This takes a bit of hit and trial which is very time-consuming. The third challenge was multitasking between spending clinical duties as well as trying to invent at the same time. It takes time to understand the right balance.

You’ve been involved with 18 innovations, so far. Which of them is closest to your heart?

Yes, I have been involved with 18 innovations, but 7 have also failed or got stalled for various reasons. They taught me that I need to stick to my clinical domain. The current product, Sinucare, officially launched into the market in October 2016 is closest to my heart. It is a device that treats sinus without any tissue removal in a safe manner through the use of an inflatable balloon that clears up the sinuses. As a surgeon, it allows me to deliver a safer and faster method of recovery while being protective of the patient’s environment, all at a low cost. This is the kind of portfolio of products I want to develop.

As a doctor, why do you think there is a dearth of low-cost innovations in India? Why are people in the rural areas still using age-old methods?

The primary person to treat patients is a doctor. So, an integral involvement of doctors is absolutely necessary to create new technology that aids in treatment. In real life, however, this doesn’t happen for reasons like our education as a doctor, the kind of burdens that we face and lack of formal ways for us to contribute to new technology that can improve treatment. Most doctors do not even know how to formally engage in being an inventor and there is the added stigma of losing credibility if they spend time inventing devices. The understanding that a doctor can treat patients by not just physically examining them, but also by working on a technology that will eventually reach the patients, is still lacking in India. At present, inventions mainly come from engineers who look at things from an outsider’s perspective and don’t truly understand the ground realities. As a result, there is a gap between products and requirements. Once you bridge that gap, like in the west, you will have more inventions coming out from India.

How is InnAccel-the MedTech innovation platform that you started, aiding in bridging this gap?

Our whole philosophy is to bridge this gap. Whenever we work on any product, there is a doctor, an engineer and a designer working together as a team and none of the doctors leave their practice. There is still a way to do work together in an integral way without losing clinical practice and we have figured out a way to do that. Our main message is that you don’t have to be just an inventor or a doctor; you can be both provided you know how to balance them together.

What does the mentor in you wish to say to the budding med-tech innovators?

My main advice is that doctors and engineers need to spend more time on the ground together to understand requirements of clinical space.The team is most important and doctor-engineer engagements have to be lot more concrete.

Your publication record suggests you favour publishing in Indian journals. Do you think it has affected your career in any way?

Yes, I took a conscious decision way back in 1971, when I was just starting my career, that I should publish as much of my research output in journals published in India as in those published from outside. The only condition that I placed was that the journal must have good peer-review process. When I learnt that some of the journals where I had submitted a manuscript accepted the same without a formal peer-review, I did not go back to them. I am happy that during all these long years of my career, I have more or less maintained a 50:50 ratio for my publications in journals published in so-called 'national' and 'international' journals. I must say at this point that these two officially used terms, 'national' and 'international', are not only misleading but inappropriate and insulting. In fact, I had argued in a commentary published in Current Science in 2013 that such a distinction must not be made since it indirectly implies that a paper published in 'national' journal is, by default, poorer than that in an 'international' journal. Our own community has created this unjustified distinction and it has affected the quality of manuscripts that are submitted to journals published in India.

As I look back at my professional career, I do not think that I have suffered in any way - I did get my due promotions as well as recognitions in form of the SS Bhatnagar Prize and fellowships of Academies. I believe that I am reasonably well recognised by peers in my field of research. In addition, this practice has given me the moral authority to encourage others to also publish in journals published in the country as long as those journals have a reasonably good peer-review process and good publication practices in place. I have no regrets for having taken this decision rather I am happy that I took such a decision early in my career and happier that I could stick to it.

What are the things that you consider when choosing a journal for submitting your papers? How important is impact factor in making that decision?

I would look for a journal which i) has a wide readership in the domain of my research, ii) has a good peer-review system, iii) does not levy any kind of charges but if it does, the journal is willing to waive off the charges, iv) it does not have charges for colour images since most of our papers will have them in good numbers, and v) provides free open access immediately or within a short time without the author being charged for it. Occasionally, I have also submitted my manuscript to a given journal because it had published another paper whose inferences were not agreeable to me.

I have never seriously worried about impact factor of the journal. Moreover, most of the so-called 'high impact factor' journals are not affordable for me because of the charges involved. My university does not provide any grant, neither for research nor for publication. Obviously, I cannot think of spending the limited money available through the externally funded projects, on publication or other charges.

Do you think it is a little unfair to expect young scientists to be oblivious of IF in publishing, since their careers trajectories and whether or not they get an academic job is often decided based the quality of journals in which they publish their work?

Yes, I agree that in recent times, the young aspirants are made to suffer if they publish in journals published in the country or in other journals that have a low IF rating. This is a very unfortunate situation, indeed. Yet it persists because of the misdirected mindset of many of our senior colleagues who sit on the 'judgment chairs' and who mostly count the impact factor without making any serious effort to see what work has actually been carried out. Unless we learn to appreciate the quality of work rather than using inappropriate metrics like impact factor for assessment of individuals and institutions, we would continue to discourage merit and promote undesirable methods which facilitate publication, by hook or crook, in high IF journals.

I am seriously against IF being given so much importance and have been encouraging the young scientists to stop worrying about IF but be confident about the quality of the work they publish. But, I agree that the seniors need to change their mindset. The sooner this happens, the better it is for all concerned in the country.

Current Science is one of India’s top academic journal, which has an impact factor of <1. Why do you think Indian journals suffer from such low ratings?

Yes, it is indeed very unfortunate that Current Science has an IF<1.0. In fact, most Indian journals have relatively low IF. There are multiple reasons, including some editorial policies and practices that do not make it attractive enough and which dilute the IF value. However, a major reason for their perceived 'poor' quality lies in the quality of submissions. What is made available by authors can be filtered only to some extent through peer-review before being published. Many of the manuscripts submitted to these journals are not first-time submissions but are secondary, tertiary or even subsequent submissions. With poor-quality submissions, you cannot expect the journal to publish high-quality research! Our colleagues argue that since these journals, by and large, do not have 'good' articles published in their pages, why should they submit their 'good ' papers to Current Science or similar other journals? This vicious circle of poor submissions and poor recognition of the journal can only be snapped if more of us choose to send our work to these journals in the first place. To expect that the journal would first become good by some magic and then our scientists would submit their 'good' papers for publication is really like placing the cart before the horse.

Do you think there’s a visibility issue? Are articles published in lower impact factor journals, seen less and consequently cited less, too?

My own experience makes me believe that the argument about visibility is a self-created alibi. All of my papers published during the 1980s in Indian Journal of Experimental Biology (CSIR) have been cited and tables and figures from some of them reproduced in reviews/monographs published by reputed authors in good journals/series books (e.g., Advances in Genetics, published by Academic Press). These papers were 'visible' to those interested even when internet did not exist and that particular journal where the work was published was not on the subscription list of most libraries around the world. Now that the internet is freely available to everyone and all journals are immediately listed by one or the other search engine, visibility is no issue at all. In fact, since most of our journals are freely available on the net, they become more visible than many others where you have to be a subscriber or willing to pay per view charge!

The other aspect of visibility of a paper relates to how one selects a paper for citation in one's own publication. I do not look for the name of the journal or the number of times the paper has been cited but like to assure myself that the paper that I am citing is indeed appropriate in the given context. Thus, neither the impact factor of the journal nor its 'visibility' to others (i.e., number of times cited) is of any consequence when I select a paper for citation.

IF was first thought of in 1975. Hasn’t it become archaic now?

The IF is not only archaic but also is being used for a purpose that it was never meant to be, by its inventor, Eugene Garfield. IF as a metric for assessment of an individual or an institution has been promoted purely for commercial purposes by big publishing houses. Many learned societies too have, unfortunately, fallen in their line.

The high IF of a journal in a given year does not necessarily guarantee the quality of every paper published in that journal in that year or during an earlier period. Unfortunately, many of our colleagues seem to be deeply imprinted by the IF bug and consequently, the first question often asked about a newly published paper concerns the IF of the journal rather than what was the significant point in the published paper. I certainly would like to see the day when no agency even wants to know the IF of journals where one has published.

Is it time to look for new metrics for measuring journal quality? Also, should we measure journal quality at all?

I believe that any metric that we develop (and many have been developed after the IF), will have serious limitations if that metric were to be used as an arithmetic value. Not only different broad disciplines but different sub-disciplines in a broad field of research have varied patterns of citations and frequencies. A given field may be populated at a given time by a much larger number of investigators (being 'in fashion') while another field would have fewer active researchers. The frequency of citations in such cases would be very different, independent of the relative quality. It would be impossible to buffer against such variations

Some metrics can be used as qualitative indicators but never as an absolute value for individuals, institutions or journals. In my perception, any ranking on such numbers is misleading and can be tweaked unfairly. I would only like to assess the quality of the questions, the approaches used to address them and finally the interpretations provided in a paper to measure the quality of science being practised. Such measurements have to be qualitative rather than quantitative.

Acknowledgements: Manupriya thanks Amitabh Joshi, TNC Vidya and Manan Gupta for conversations that led to this article.

Please give us an overview of your academic background.

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, a Master’s degree in Anthropology, and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Pune. I pursued a second Master’s degree in Health Sciences with specialization in Bioethics from the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics, Canada. I also spent about 5 years in active research at the University of Toronto.

When and why did you decide to become an independent researcher?

While pursuing my doctoral studies, I worked on an international project on ‘development participatory communication’ hosted at my University in collaboration with Cornell University, USA. While this was a huge opportunity to learn various skills necessary for empirical research, it also exposed me to University politics. Soon after my doctoral thesis submission, I moved to the Centre of Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT), a unit of Anusandhan Trust, Mumbai, where I spent 15 years. CEHAT always attempted to strike a balance between academically rigorous research and socially relevant advocacy/activism. The work ethos and environment was shaped by democratic values, non-hierarchical relationships amongst colleagues, a strong sense of equity, and respect for ethics, as one of the non-negotiables. I think my slightly negative experience in an academic set up, coupled with my satisfying stint at CEHAT, affected my views, and later, my decision to stay away from mainstream academics. Upon my return from the University of Toronto, I got many opportunities for offering professional consultation. I took up one such assignment and then gradually moved to working as an independent researcher. My father, who was 85 years old then, had been diagnosed with cancer. Having spent time away from India and family, I truly wished to have flexibility while I pursued my work. As I was working as an ‘independent professional in the capacity of a consultant’, it allowed me immense flexibility to be with my family and my father during his year long illness.

What is the kind of work that you have done ever since you became an independent researcher? What are your current projects looking at?

I continue to work in two broad fields of enquiry: health and bioethics. It mostly involves research, writing, training, and program evaluation.

I am currently associated with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, working on a project supported by the Department of Health Research, Indian Council of Medical Research, which deals with gender-based violence and public health care system. Additionally, I serve on the international Ethics Review Board of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). I also work on academic writings outside of my paid commitments.

I remain associated with a couple of academic settings more in the capacity of invited resource person/faculty to conduct workshops in the areas of bioethics, research methodology, and other more focused topical areas.

How have you been funding your work?

I have been largely working on initiatives that are already funded and I was invited to join these initiatives as co-leads. Recently, however, I have started getting involved in raising funds in collaboration with researchers located at institutions.

What do you think have been the major advantages of being an independent researcher?

Working in academia or the NGO sector can be extremely hectic, at times. Being an ‘independent professional’ allows me the time and space to do other things of my interest - both work related and other activities - alongside my consultative assignments. It also makes me free of too many institutional and administrative responsibilities. I do get involved in organisational activities, but it is out of interest and not a part of my paid commitments. I am also in a position to not commit to a new assignment soon after wrapping up one. More importantly, I have a choice to accept only those tasks that interest me and when I want to do paid work. Another thing I truly love about working as an independent researcher/professional is to not have to travel for work every day in a city like Pune. Saving on travel time to work place adds to the number of hours available to me. I also find this arrangement eco-friendly.

Have you faced any difficulties because of the lack of an institutional affiliation? Especially with respect to funding?

Being an ‘independent researcher’ may mean building one’s own research projects and raising funds for the same without any institutional affiliations; or it may mean working in the capacity of a consultant on different initiatives located in institutions. And, there could be a range of other arrangements between these two notions of ‘being an independent professional’. The former is challenging as funders are not inclined to support individuals for big initiatives. However, since I have always been associated with funded initiatives, I have not had to face these issues. Some of the other inconveniences are lack of access to institutional infrastructure and access to support staff.

Do you think having an adjunct faculty or any other honorary position in institutions are of any help?

There is an obvious divide between mainstream academics and alternative spaces about the significance attached to degrees and positions held and formal affiliations with established institutions. Designations, positions, degrees - all matter in the mainstream settings. But these are somewhat less relevant in the alternative organisational structures like certain NGOs. However, it does matter to have some kind of an institutional affiliation and often is an added asset. It is, to some extent, fair to the employer as it serves as a proxy indicator of one’s credentials. I did not particularly pursue such matters though.

Do you feel this is a financially stable career option

This would really depend upon the juncture at which one chooses this mode of work; what financial responsibilities one has towards family; what financial aspirations one has in addition to the professional aspiration.

I enjoyed my time when I worked in institutional settings, both the universities and NGOs. I also must mention that at this juncture in life, I have a better sense of stability and therefore better placed to not focus on salary scales but the type of work I get.

I think, generally speaking, for emerging researchers and scholars it might be somewhat challenging financially.

What would be your advice to fellow/aspiring independent researchers?

Personally, I would not have chosen to be an independent professional soon after my doctoral studies as it may not be very conducive to one’s growth during this critical phase of one’s career. It is also important to develop resilience and build on ‘not-so-good’ experiences at work places. Peer-to-peer learning is of salience, too. A bag of mixed and diverse experiences is what one needs to aim at when we step into the “job market” after schooling.

However, I think central to this conversation is the availability of choices for independent professionals which again, is a function of one’s own circumstances, one’s credibility in the peer community, one’s ‘reputation’ as a professional, one’s own commitment to professional integrity, and one’s passion for thematic areas! If we could be true to ourselves, it would be easier to navigate through the challenges we encounter as independent professionals. To be able to build on our strengths and reflect on weaknesses and work on those as we define our trajectories is helpful. I must mention that I have been fortunate to not have to look for such work. Instead, I was approached by colleagues and friends from my network asking me if I wished to take up those projects with them. It does not mean that this would always be the case. I myself was without any paid assignment for almost a year after having done three back to back consultancies. My suggestion would be to not be bound by things around us, be open to explore, be willing to take some risks when possible, and choose what offers one to grow and be creative. I guess independence of this kind in our professional life is critical which is not necessarily linked only to being an independent professional.

Please give us an overview of your academic and research background.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Zoology, M.S. in Ecology and Environment Science from Pondicherry University and a PhD from Wildlife Institute of India. My doctoral dissertation examined the social behaviour of Lions. I have set up my own organisation Carnivore Conservation & Research (CCR) in Mumbai. CCR is a conservation research organisation working to contribute to the knowledge and conservation of carnivores with a focus on Asiatic lions. CCR proposes to undertake consultancy and research projects related to these topics.

When and why did you decide to become an independent researcher?

A PhD degree which is achieved after many years in research is a milestone as well as a crossroad that is not different from the previous ones starting from high school to post graduation. At each stage, the path has to be chosen based on scope, skills and interest. As one walks the academic path, the options get fewer with little help or vision in the system itself to sustain competent, experienced scientists.

For a good post-doc to transpire, a research scholar has to find the right partnership with another scientist having similar interest and working culture. A post-doc affiliation will often not be very different from the PhD experience - that is, compulsion to align to boss’ or lab’s research objectives.Thus, getting a funded project, a suitable lab/work environment where one can pursue one’s own creative path is very challenging and time-consuming through a formal post-doc engagement. There is a lot of debate on whether PhD scholars should continue to work on their research topics and there have also been discussions on this topic in this forum. In my case, there were two reasons for carrying forward my research and I am sure these are applicable to many others as well.

Ideally, research projects should progress in a logical sequence – conception of the project, defining objectives, designing methods, logistics planning, completing administrative and bureaucratic formalities, field data collection and analysis, and final report preparation. Typically, a wildlife biology student may join a project at any one of these stages and is often unaware of what is happening to the planning and execution of the other stages. Studies in wildlife biology are complex, multi-disciplinary and also have to accommodate conservation themes with academic enquiry.

Every student who has completed a PhD is sure to have misgivings about his or her own data, sample sizes and overall quality of research often for reasons that have the least to do with his or her application and hard work in compiling the data. The reason for this may be many - ranging from lack of cooperation from institute/supervisor, incompatible research objectives with overall project goals, malfunctioning equipment added to numerous other challenges at the field level.

In my case, the variables in the way of smooth functioning of the project were so many that could probably crash a super-computer! It was not easy to study an endangered, charismatic species such as the Asiatic lion. So clearly, there were a lot of incomplete research ideas that I was interested in further taking on after my PhD.

I felt that I had the desired experience and knowledge and was capable of taking this project through this logical research process. After this became clear to me, the decision to go independent followed.

What is the kind of work that you have done ever since you became an independent researcher? What are your current projects looking at?

Lions are fascinating social cats that show a remarkable plasticity in their social behaviour across their range. For my PhD, I was able to study Asiatic lion social organisation with special reference to male lions and their reproductive strategies.

The continued survival of charismatic, large mammals depends on careful management planning. Research topics relevant to conservation, particularly of endangered species, therefore, need our urgent attention and are easier to achieve than subjects of exclusive academic interest. As an independent researcher, I have therefore moved away from my initial interest in behavioural ecology and have started to focus on human-lion-leopard interface issues outside the Gir Protected Area because the only free-ranging population of the endangered Asiatic Lion survives in this agro-pastoral landscape

I am trying to come up with optimum human-wildlife coexistence models. Hopefully, I will be able to meaningfully contribute to conservation and management through my research work.

How have you been funding your work?

I have raised funds through small grants and have not looked at large grant options so far. In the future, as I develop my basic infrastructure and succeed in building a strong team, I will apply for bigger grants.

What have been the major advantages of being an independent researcher?

The biggest advantage is to be able to conceive and implement my ideas without being interrupted by other goals or interference from any quarter. I have been able to set hard targets and carry on the way I want.

Having said that, my previous experience of having worked at the Wildlife Institute of India has helped me along the way in attracting scientific collaborations and other formalities at the field level.

Have you faced any difficulties because of the lack of an institutional affiliation, especially with respect to funding, permits, or collaborations?

Individual integrity and others' appreciation of it alone is not enough when one speaks of getting grants for research. I have had some setbacks in applying for grants, especially from government sources. In these cases one has to be affiliated or set up collaborations with scientists who are formally employed as faculty in universities or other government agencies.

Do you think, having an adjunct faculty or any other honorary position in institutions are of any help?

Yes, that would help. It would mean financial stability, access to varied grant sources, and the freedom to mentor and involve students in ongoing research projects.

Do you feel this is a financially stable career option?

There are a lot of things that determine stability. One, your idea –good or relevant – should appeal to a funding agency. These days research grants are topical and priorities may change from year to year. I wouldn’t say it is a stable career option to start with but with persistence, one can make it so. A lot of will-power, self-belief, skill and of course a little PR is required to be successful in the long-run.

What would be your advice to fellow/aspiring independent researchers?

It depends on who wants to become an independent researcher and whether the choice is because of personal compulsions (unable to relocate to other cities or women who need flexible timings to manage families) or because you want to be your own boss and lead the research. Success would depend on how much experience/expertise, goodwill and contacts you have built in the profession and at what age you make this decision.

So, either you choose this path because of personal circumstances or because of your desire to pursue something on your own terms. Either way, independent researchers should be prepared to continuously raise grants, for spells of “no funding” and anticipate various other setbacks they would be likely to face due to lack of institutional backing.

Scientists in wildlife research who want to be “independent researchers” should have the determination to find ways to survive for themselves, and ideally, also for the forests and wildlife they study.

Please give us an overview of your academic background.

My educational qualifications include a BAMS from Sambalpur University, Odisha; an MPH from Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Bengaluru and an MA in International Family Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

When and why did you decide to become an independent researcher?

My research interests are purely personal as my current capacity as a program manager does not necessarily require me to be in a research role. However, I always look for opportunities for formal research in areas where my project is implemented.

What kind of work have you done ever since you became an independent researcher? What are your current projects looking at?

I have tried both quantitative and qualitative research in several areas such as; maternity management, family planning, Tuberculosis (TB), social and behavioural health and AYUSH. My current job is mainly looking at issues relating to private sector engagement for TB care and control, notification of TB cases, advocacy for a ban on sero-diagnosis of TB, adherence of STCI (Standards of TB care in India) guidelines among the qualified private practitioners and active case finding at community level. I have started investigating some of these issues as well.

How have you been funding your work?

Till now I have funded my own work. I have never applied for funding and therefore, never had access to any external funding. This obviously hinders me from carrying out large scale studies and publishing in some high impact journals that have a high publishing fee. Thus for me, the research and publication is a pure personal effort.

What do you think have been the major advantages of being an independent researcher?

Well, you can investigate issues as per your own wish and without any limitation. In addition, most of the times an affiliated researcher needs to consider the interests of the organisation that s/he is associated with. If the subject is against the interest of the organisation then it would be difficult to investigate the same. Take for example, the ban on sero-diagnosis of Tuberculosis. The government of India is advocating for a ban on sero-diagnosis of TB, however, a researcher associated with an organisation that works on development or manufacturing of sero-diagnostic tools can neither advocate for this ban nor conduct any research on it.

Do you think having an adjunct faculty or any other honorary position in institutions is of any help?

Yes definitely. This enables a researcher in conducting collaborative research and provides access to various other forms of support that are unavailable on an individual level.

Do you feel this is a financially stable career option?

No idea, as I have never been a full-time independent researcher. My research is purely driven by my personal interest and is a part-time activity. Thus, I won’t be able to say much about financial stability as I have never tried for funding or gained any financial incentive as a result of my research.

What would be your advice to fellow/aspiring independent researchers?

If anybody is interested in research then there are a whole lot of issues around us to investigate. As a researcher with limited experience, I would say it can get a bit difficult at times, but, as they say, where there is a will there is a way. I have many friends who are doing independent research and are quite successful too.

Please give us an overview of your academic background.

My undergraduate degree (BSc, plus an honours year) was done at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. From there I went to Cambridge University, UK, for my PhD. I researched seed dispersal and gibbons in Indonesian Borneo, under David Chivers. I returned to New Zealand for a postdoctoral position.

When and why did you decide to become an independent researcher?

In 2003, my husband and I moved to India for his work. I initially had plans to begin a couple of research projects in India and Thailand, but pregnancy (and the subsequent baby!) made these plans a challenge. We don’t live in a city that has a strong (or any, really) network of researchers doing any work similar to what I was interested in. Hence, I had to choose between making a career change, being a largely-absentee mother, or focus on my children and fit my research around them. I chose to be available for my kids and become an independent researcher (in my spare time!).

What is the kind of work that you have done ever since you became an independent researcher? What are your current projects looking at?

Before having my first child I had begun a collaboration with researchers working in Mahidol University and Biotec in Thailand. They were very supportive of a researcher-mum and this enabled me to establish a long-term project with them. Over the last 12 years we have been investigating seed dispersal interactions in Khao Yai National Park, Thailand. As my children have got older and more independent, I have been able to increase the amount of work I can take on; I have recently initiated additional research collaborations in Malaysia – still focused on an overall theme of seed dispersal.

Along with my own research, I have advised students (mainly PhD) over the years, and am also a Subject Editor for Biotropica. More recently, I am involved in a venture to conduct student workshops across tropical Asia on seed dispersal interactions. These types of activities allow me to keep up-to-date with what is happening, given I am unable to have my own research group.

How have you been funding your work?

I am lucky in that I can afford to partially fund my research trips. I am also assisted partially by some of the collaborations I am involved in. Initially, I applied for research grants but the limitations of when and how often I could be in the field made this approach difficult.

What do you think have been the major advantages of being an independent researcher?

Now, I appreciate the flexibility I have and the lack of administration duties! If the financial obstacles can be overcome then these are significant advantages.

Have you faced any difficulties because of the lack of an institutional affiliation? Especially with respect to funding, permits, or collaborations?

At the start, especially, there were many problems with being an independent researcher, but these were also partly due to my priority of being available for my children. I was working from home, far from people who were doing similar things and I really missed having colleagues to discuss things with. These discussions are important for processing new ideas and finding solutions to problems. Because of financial constraints I would conduct research once or twice a year, and I was reluctant to travel to other cities regularly for “colleague-contact” due to family constraints.

Over the years the situation has improved as I have built up a reasonable network of supportive and stimulating colleagues and friends. As my children have got older and finances have become easier I am also able to travel a bit more.

If I had been able to devote more time to managing field projects, I feel confident that funding could have been obtained for major research ideas – with the help of collaborations. However, funding for scoping projects and general equipment would probably have been difficult to obtain through the options available. These are often borne by the work institute and are not available to independent researchers.

Being an independent researcher has not been a problem in forming collaborations. Having these collaborations has meant that obtaining permits has been straightforward, so far.

Do you think having an adjunct faculty or any other honorary position in institutions are of any help?

Yes – I am certain it has made the processing of research permits more straightforward. These positions also have a positive impact on morale! It is nice to belong “somewhere” and also helps in building a network of colleagues.

Do you feel this is a financially stable career option?

I didn’t make the decision to do this based on finances and it certainly isn’t a stable choice for me. However, I do know people (generally without families, and in regions where contract work is available) who can dedicate sufficient time and effort to making a career of independent research. In all of these cases I have noticed it takes considerable time – usually on a very limited income – to build a career.

What would be your advice to fellow/aspiring independent researchers?

I can really only offer advice to people in situations similar to mine – where the decision to work independently is due to family constraints: figure out how much time and finances you can devote to your career and work persistently within these boundaries. To build a colleague and work base, say “yes” to any work, which connects somehow to your skill-base – even if there does not seem to be any immediate benefit for you. Over time this can build respect and a network of people who could help you build a career.

After graduating with a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), what triggered your interest in a life outside of academia?

It wasn’t a planned move. Soon after I submitted my thesis I got a job offer from Novozymes. I was still looking for postdoc positions then. However, the offer Novozymes made, was too good to resist. They were setting up their first India-based R&D unit and I was one of the first group of people to be hired on the team. Not only was it a great opportunity to set up something new and exciting, it also did something to satisfy the entrepreneur inside me. So, I accepted the offer and felt quite sure at that time that I will continue in Novozymes all my working life. When I told my professors about this shift in my career trajectory, one of them, Soumitra Das, a professor at Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology at IISc gave me very good advice. He said, “don't think of it as a destination but as a platform to take off.” That advice has served me well. I have taken each step as it came and, tried to have fun along the way.

What was the initial phase of this transition to the industry like? How different was the environment at Novozymes, in comparison to academic labs?

Yes, it was challenging. I had to learn a lot of things quickly– to work with a team, to work with a new technology, to coordinate with scientists from different countries. The learning curve was steep, but it was an enriching experience. I learnt that in industry goals are different. As PhD students we were more concerned about doing good research, making a thesis and publishing papers. In industry, however, the question was how much IP (intellectual property) could we create with the resource we had access to. In fact, it was at Novozymes that I first got exposed to intellectual property rights, the different patent laws and the processes involved in patenting.

So that’s where my third question comes. How did you transition again, from industry to being an entrepreneur?

While still at Novozymes, I had started getting interested in IP and patent laws. Also, after two years at Novozymes, the lab, the processes, the SOPs (standard operating procedures), all were set up quite well and I had begun feeling a little stagnant. So, following my instinct, one more time, I quit Novozymes and joined National Law School of India University, Bangalore for a degree in law followed by a Post Graduate Certification in Business Management from Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar. After my second stint at school was over, I was again faced with a choice–whether to go back to the industry or start up on my own. I chose the latter. I thought it would allow me to add value to people’s work and life, in way that was not possible in the industry.

What motivates you to keep learning? Going back to college, wasn’t it hard?

It’s not a course or a degree that motivates me. Instead, it is the process of learning that excites me.I am a people’s person. I just want to know more about different people and learn from each and everybody. So, every year I try to do one or two small courses. Go and mix with a different set of crowd. They could be entrepreneurs, or students, or scientists, or lawyers or dancers. This is what has kept me motivated to learn.

Let’s talk about your life as an entrepreneur. How does it feel to be one?

I incorporated the company in 2012. Right after which, there was a period when I kept having the feeling of deja vu. I saw the challenge, the learning curve and the same heady excitement of my early days at Novozymes. We’ve come a long way since then and things are much more stable. I am enjoying what I am doing and I am quite sure I would not have been happier had I continued in the industry.

What are some of the biggest challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

There have been challenges galore. Resilience in facing failure and willingness to learn have helped me trudge along. I think one has to be very positive and believe fully in their goals. And then of course, the other very important thing is to work hard. There can be no compromise in that at all.

It helps to have a supportive family structure. You have to take them along. You have to make them as a team, otherwise, it can get quite hard. We also need to build our relationship with our friends They are like your support network. It's particularly important for a women entrepreneur.

How do you maintain your work life balance? This is a challenge faced by most professionals, but may be more relevant for women.

I think people have a lot of expectations from women. Like you have to be a perfect mother, perfect wife, perfect professional, perfect in everything. I think we need to let go of this chase for perfection in everything because human beings can’t be perfect. I think that thought can take away a lot of unnecessary pressure.

It is also important to not worry about other’s approval and to unhesitatingly ask for help when needed.

What is the main mantra of success according to you?

I think there are three key things that drive success, one is to have a dream, the second is to believe in it and then work hard to achieve it.

One more thing that I believe is important to stay away from too much of planning. If we plan too much and things do not fall in place we become demotivated very soon. You plan what is required and as you go along, plans might change so be flexible enough to accommodate those changes in your plan.

What message would you like to give to the readers?

For the youngsters, I will say, we have just one life, you really do not need to be very critical of yourself. Be good to yourself, dream big and if you really believe in it, just go for it. Work hard for your dream. Ultimately it is your dream, you wanted it and you tried for it. Even if you fail, the experience of having had a go at it will be more gratifying than not having tried at all.

You have said previously that the transition from being a student to doing research involves a process of ‘unlearning’. Can you please elaborate on what form this ‘unlearning’ should take?

If you want to make this transition you really have to turn around 180 degrees because the optimum strategy for being successful in taking courses and passing exams is quite the opposite – not just different but the opposite – of the optimum strategy for making discoveries. For example, if you want to take courses and pass exams then it makes sense for you to place yourself in a place where you are comfortable. For example, you have an exam and you know that you are going to be given six questions and you have to answer any four. It makes sense for you to focus on the four where you are most comfortable. It doesn’t make sense for you to say I know the answers to these four, I don’t know these two, but I am going to try and answer these two. But if you are doing research that is exactly what you have to do. It doesn’t make any sense to say I know this, therefore, I am going to work on this area. You have to work on what you don’t know. You have to move away from the comfort zone of knowledge and familiarity and position yourself in the discomfort zone of ignorance and unfamiliarity. In other words, you must enjoy feeling stupid. Now that is easy to say – most people will agree with that – but the problem is much deeper and psychological. Our entire social structure is built on great prestige for knowing facts and great shame for not knowing facts. Somehow thinking is not part of our social culture. In research obviously, that doesn’t work. You have to do exactly the opposite and you have to learn how to think de novo.

Given the large number of people applying, how should one pick candidates for a research programme?

Take them outside their zone of comfort and see whether they can think. It is not so difficult. In 30 minutes you can judge whether a person is capable of thinking. It depends on how you spend those 30 minutes. What we typically do is for 25 out of 30 minutes we ask them for the facts they know, and for barely 5 minutes we ask them to think – that is the problem.

What isyour own strategy when it comes to choosing a research question. What makes a particular topic worth pursuing for you?

The answer should not be obvious, it should be hard to find. Only then it’s challenging. I have chosen to understand everything humanly possible about one species of social wasp. That is my decision. That’s what I want to do. In trying to fulfil that decision I’m not always in the position of saying shall I answer this question or that question. I need to answer all or most questions in order to go to the next level. So in real life, I don’t always discard questions because they are easy or obvious. I do them quickly. But I find more challenge in those questions where the answer is not so obvious. Often there are lots of not so interesting questions that you have to answer to be in a position to get to the big, more interesting and more challenging questions.

You have been working with this one species for over 30 years. Right from the beginning did you know that this was going to be a long-term research interest?

Not in the beginning but very soon it became obvious. I seriously started working on this species roughly in the year 1980. And in 5 years it was clear to me that there is enough gold here that one can spend one’s whole life in it.

When it comes to choosing research questions, do considerations such as doability, money required, technology required etc. play a role in your choice?

Absolutely. And I think the biggest mistake that people make is they do not do what I call a feasibility analysis. You are a postdoc in NIH, you are working on a problem, and you bring a little piece of that problem and come and join some place in India and want to do the same thing. You are not worried about whether you can do the same thing with the same level of competitiveness; you do not worry enough about what you will need, how much money you will need, what kind of facility you will need. Nobody worries about these matters, or at least not enough. They start off and then they complain. I think that’s the biggest problem. What you need to do is choose a research problem where the rate-limiting step is only your intelligence. That’s what should actually finally stop you, not money, facilities or anything else. You can say this is all I could do because that’s all the brain I have. Whereas if you say: oh, I could have done so much better if I had more money or if I had that equipment, that’s a ready-made excuse not to do very well.

But there are external forces that make people use the approaches/technologies that are in fashion, e.g. the pressure to use molecular approaches in ecology today?

That’s correct. But I would put 10% of the blame on the people who put the pressure and 90% on the person who succumbs to the pressure. Often we succumb to imagined pressure. And even if it is real pressure we do precious little to fight the system. So, I’m not convinced by this argument.

There’s another kind of pressure – the pressure to publish in high-impact journals. How do you decide where to send the papers you write?

There are only two things that matter to me. One is, as far as possible, it should go to the audience I would like to reach. Today, that is becoming less important because you put it on your website and people will see it. So what is the most important consideration? It should get published, it should not get rejected, For which, I would send my paper to a journal where it has the highest chance of getting accepted, not Nature or Science. Can anything be more stupid that judging the quality of work depending on where it’s published?

When you find yourself in a position where you have to judge the work of your peers or students, what do you look for?

I do not judge on numbers of papers or citations or impact factors. I judge on the content and I try to understand the content and I try to compare the content. That’s baseline for me. I am really impressed by a piece of work if I feel: Why didn’t I think of it? That’s my ultimate test. In addition, I would say: What would have happened if this paper was not published? Would it have made a difference to the field? You can always say all data is necessary, and, in the future who knows somebody may need it. Fine, but suppose I want to give a prize to one out of 10 people, I would certainly think about- What would have happened if this paper had not been published?

When do you feel that way? Does it depend on how novel the work is, does it depend on risk-taking, does it depend on being correct?

It definitely doesn’t depend on being correct. It is cleverness. For example, let’s say you take a well-known technique in one field and apply it to another field in an extremely exciting way. If you apply it in the same field there is nothing so great about it. Sometimes when I see work which is highly-valued or published in Nature, I ask myself: why did this person and not that person do this? Often the answer is: Because only this person had access to this data, or this population, or that instrument. That is not so great. It’s not surprising that they did it. I am excited by work that anybody could have done, in principle, but only one person did it. The kind of work that makes me think: why didn’t I think of that?

How do you encourage and increase creativity in your lab?

I promote this idea of appreciating something not because it is sophisticated, not because it’s published in Nature, not because it’s correct, but because it is very original and creative. So you can promote this philosophy by constantly judging other's work and then injecting this philosophy while making those judgements. The harder job is to actually get students to become creative themselves. If you are the supervisor then on the rare occasion when two students come up with two different ideas you can say why you like one or the other based on these criteria. Although that doesn’t happen every day. In short, there is no better way than to lead by example – be creative yourself, but that, of course, is harder still!

A longer version of this interview can be accessed here.

Tell us a little bit about your career trajectory.

I did my PhD at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, where I trained as a biochemist. Most of my PhD was aimed at understanding how chromatin remodelling occurs, especially during germ cell maturation. Having done a PhD, after the usual toying between industry and a postdoc, postdoc seemed the most obvious path to tread for me. I moved on to do something that was very different from my PhD work. I did a postdoc atInstitute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) in Strasbourg, France. I worked more or less independently in the lab where I was hosted on understanding how metabolic inputs control chromatin and chromatin-dependent processes including transcription. After a 4-year stint—a relatively short postdoc—I came back to India as an independent faculty in 2008 to TIFR, Bombay, and I’ve been here since.

When you looked to return to India, had you considered anything other than the tenure track position?

Back then, positions in the tenure track were not really well-defined in the Indian system. In fact, a lot of us got to know about the tenure track after we joined. Having said that, options apart from academia were always on the cards. However, one could not always be sure about what the job prospects were. The most attractive positions were of course in industry—in pharma and biotech. But my personal preference was for academia.

Let’s talk about choices—or the lack thereof—within academia.

It’s interesting because at the time I was ready to look for jobs, I was offered the chance to stay back in the French system itself. There—although they do get in people as independent researchers—most often, the only route to becoming an independent group leader is to start off as a junior group leader. I believe this system helps people who are postdocs and who are probably not sure about jumping into an independent position as a group leader. When you join as a junior group leader, depending on your interests, motivation and capabilities you may or may not end up becoming an independent group leader.

I did not pursue the possibility of staying back in France because I was very keen to come back to India. However, there was uncertainty and lack of clarity of what it means to lead a research group independently. There were a lot of apprehensions, but given the drive to lead an independent group within the academic system, I had to take the plunge, oblivious to the challenges.

So you believe we should consider adopting the junior group leader model? How will it play out in India?

In many places, particularly in systems where the science and scientific approaches are much more mature, one would always have a system where a typical lab would have a lab manager and possibly a junior group leader or technicians. Now that is useful because in some sense you want to divide the labour while maintaining efficiency. In the context where you don’t have these systems, often, new faculty (PI) would be the clerk, the manager, the accountant and the technician of the lab. That may be one way of doing things, and also has its merits. On the flipside, particularly with the tenure track system, it is a huge burden for a young researcher to shoulder. They end up spending a lot of time doing a lot of things that do not directly relate to their science. However, not doing these will affect your science and career, given the lack of support staff within the group/lab.

What do you see as the advantage of the junior PI system?

The success of a postdoc does not guarantee prospective success in science as an independent group leader. Often one sees that people who are prolific scientists as postdocs may fail as group leaders because they need to do a lot more things than just as a postdoc. This includes administration and manpower management. In this regard, the option to choose a junior PI position could serve as a nice transition for a junior PI to assess their own skills. However, retaining the possibility to join directly as an independent group leader is also advisable. It should be provided as an option. I would argue that it will help the system and the junior/senior PIs as well.

There’s another advantage. Currently, we’re losing out on a lot of motivated, talented people who can productively contribute to Indian science. In the present scenario, either a postdoc has to become an independent group leader—a plunge they may not be willing to take—or move into other careers. The junior PI positions will be in addition to independent faculty positions and help retain talented scientists.

Is there a danger of the junior PI position being seen as a prolonged postdoc?

Yes and no. I guess, in some sense, it could be seen as a glorious postdoc position, particularly if it is not defined well. To avoid that, the expectations and the job description have to be well thought out. Mechanisms must be put in place to make sure that the junior PI leads projects and students of their own within the lab and have the possibility of producing independent papers—these will evolve over time and will depend on the people involved. Essentially, there is a danger, but there is also potential for setting it up in a way that avoids pitfalls and instead makes the positions truly valuable.

There could be several other possible routes to retain talented postdocs within the system and what I have described is purely based on my personal experience of a system that has benefited from junior PI positions. But it is extremely timely to find this or any other modes/mechanisms before we lose talent to ‘internal brain-drain’.

Speaking of creating opportunities, who plays a big role in bringing about the change? It is obvious that funding is required to support such models. So, should institutions take charge, should funding bodies initiate grants?

Even before we ask about funding, we should ask whether these should be permanent or temporary positions. The former offer more stability for researchers and allows for fruitful long-term associations. However, if things sour or if the junior researcher doesn’t measure up to expected standards, this is not good for the lab. Having said that, temporary positions come with their own problems—one could think about exploitation and uncertainty for a young researcher. A simple way to get around these pitfalls is maybe to have contract positions for a defined period of time, and an evaluation that is not PI based. This will take away the bias—either in favour or against—similar to how our grants and tenure are evaluated, to make sure that the interests of both the people are taken care of. Maybe 5 or 6-year terms can be assured, and the researchers know that their contracts will be renewed when they perform.

In terms of where should the money come from, I guess it is better if it is institutionalised. This will give control and incentive for setting up mechanisms for evaluation at an institutional level. If it is only grant based, fewer individuals will have access to such positions and it becomes difficult to apply thresholds and filters, both to induct and to weed out.

How do you think the proposed model will benefit those who are already part of the current system?

Tomorrow, if I want to have a facility manager and there is a well-trained postdoc who comes along, who doesn’t want to be a group leader or a tech, I still don’t see a straightforward way of hiring them. Such hiring decisions remain ad hoc and not regularised. In my opinion, when you become more senior in the system, you will have more access to people, resources and collaborations, platforms, money, manpower and space. So not having such positions may not affect senior people as much—they can find and choose the manpower they want. It’s the mid-career people who will immensely benefit from creating such positions.

Can the junior group leader position be seen as an alternative for postdocs?

Possibly yes, but I think one shouldn’t replace the other. Postdoc positions are different in some key ways. Postdocs bring vibrancy to the system; you turn them over more quickly than a junior group leader. Many a time you get a postdoc who comes in from a completely different field and creates a niche within the lab. This helps the lab. A junior group leader is a more permanent member of the lab. While competent fresh PhDs can be hired as junior group leaders, it is useful for someone with prior postdoc experience to subsequently transition to these positions. The positive and welcome effect that introducing junior group leader positions may have is to shorten the length of postdocs.

It is generally difficult to bring about changes in the system, both at the personal and administrative level. How do you then initiate something new?

We always come up with reasons for why something should not work. It is only when you start a system that you will ever come to know the sustainability of the decision. An open interaction between the administration, senior PI and prospective applicants should be encouraged. Senior PI should be more forthcoming in describing the requirements and expectations of the system to ensure a smooth transitioning into an independent position. There are many people who have come back after doing postdocs elsewhere and still more who are interested in doing so. We also have a growing pool of homegrown postdocs. Our system has to expand; right now, there are not as many positions as one would like to have. We don’t want talented and motivated researchers to leave science frustrated. One should take the risk of failing in the hope that it will help the system.

There seem to be conflicting reports on whether glaciers around the world are retreating or not, and the rates at which they are retreating. What are your views on this subject?

I personally feel that there is no real conflict in the scientific community on this matter. The scientific community predominantly believes that glaciers throughout the world are retreating. However, ambiguity in measuring glacier retreat does come up, mainly because of differing interpretations of how glacier mass changes with glacier retreat.

Change in glacier mass with glacier retreat is a complex phenomenon controlled by numerous factors – terrain, geomorphology, and other physical aspects of glaciers. If one does not understand or account for such factors comprehensively, one may come to the erroneous conclusion that glaciers are not retreating. Oftentimes, when glaciers lose mass and their volumes reduce, the change takes a long time to reflect on glacier length, which could lead to people believing that glaciers are not retreating. There is also a huge variation in the rate at which glaciers retreat – some retreat fast, others slowly, and some appear to be stagnant. But a close look at the global or international picture shows that glaciers all over the world are retreating.

I believe it is futile to continue arguing whether glaciers are retreating or not; it would be a better use of our energies to make necessary contingency plans to secure water security for India.

In direct contrast to the global picture of glacier retreat, the Karakoram glaciers seem to be stable, a phenomenon that has been dubbed “The Karakoram anomaly”. Could you explain why this is a special case?

As far as the Karakorams are concerned, the situation is unique. In glacier research, there is a concept called the equilibrium line altitude (ELA) – this is the altitude at which mass loss in a glacier is zero, that is, ice accumulation from snow is equal to ice lost in melting. Parts of the glacier that lie above the ELA will accumulate ice since mass lost through melting is lesser than the amount of snowfall received. Since the Karakoram mountains are at a very high altitude, much of the glacier mass in this area lies above the ELA. Because of this, these glaciers still have a small positive mass balance, which means they are either growing or are not retreating as of now. However, some of our work shows that with the current rate of climate change, even the Karakoram glaciers will begin to retreat within the next 20 – 25 years.

How does one measure “glacier health”?

Fundamentally, glacier health is a measure of how stable a glacier is. We can estimate glacier health using four parameters – mass loss, debris on the glacier, glacier thickness and glacier length. Every glacier has a certain amount of ice of a certain thickness, which is determined by how much snowfall it receives in winter and how much ice melts in summer. If a glacier is losing more ice mass than it gains as snow, it will have negative mass-balance, and such glaciers are in a retreating phase – such glaciers are not healthy.

Another component in determining glacier health is the amount of debris on the glacier. In the Himalayas, valleys where glaciers are formed, have huge side walls adjacent to them. Because of weathering, rock from these walls fall on the glaciers. If glaciers are healthy, they have only a small amount of debris on them since the fallen rocks are quickly brought down to exit at the glacier terminus. However, if glacier thickness is reduced, the amount of debris keeps increasing, which is another sign of an unhealthy glacier.

The other factors – glacier ice thickness and length, are also key factors of glacier health. However, all these parameters must be used in conjunction to estimate glacier health. Any one alone will not give an accurate measure of whether a glacier is retreating or not.

What are the difficulties facing researchers working on glaciers? Is there some way of overcoming them?

One must understand that most field work on glaciers, especially in the Himalayas, is very difficult. Because of their extremely remote location, it is very demanding for anyone to physically go there to take measurements. Any such study would require a few days’ trekking to get there, and special mountaineering skills and equipment are a must. Because of such conditions, there are obvious limitations to how much one can observe or measure, which could leave such studies open to erroneous interpretations.

One of the main difficulties in studying Himalayan glaciers is the that many parameters cannot be physically obtained. However, we have overcome some issues by using other techniques – satellite images and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to make measurements and observations. One of the very difficult tasks in the past was to determine the aerial extent of glaciers. But now, with the advances in satellite technology and India’s excellent satellite program, we have images and multispectral data which makes it much easier to map a glacier. These advances, which have come about in the last 10 to 15 years, allow us to know the aerial extent of glaciers with good accuracy.

What we don’t have information on now, is the depth of glaciers. Satellite remote sensing cannot measure the depth of glaciers, one needs special radars for such studies that cannot be launched on a satellite. As going to each glacier to physically measure its depth is quite an impossible task, we have such measurements only for a few glaciers. Now, the challenge we face is to understand how best we can use those few observations to account for the entire Himalayan mountain range. For this, we are working on theoretical modelling systems that explores measured depths and predicted depths of glaciers.

We, at the Divecha centre and IISc are very keen on solving this problem, and so we have developed a new model which is based on field observations, satellite observations and theoretical models. Using that now, we hope we can estimate the spatial distribution of glacial depth.

I will give you an example of how risky glacier studies can be, from my own experience. It was, I think, the year 1987 when I had gone on my first glacier-studying expedition, organised by the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geography. I was supposed to take the spectral reflectance of various snow and ice features for a better interpretation of satellite images – where a glacier ends, or where it begins, based on reflectance characteristics.

I was very young then, and even though I had had mountaineering training– by then, I was a certified mountaineer – I wasn’t entirely prepared for what happened. In the mountains, we have a very small window of time to study reflectance- only about two hours on a daily basis. This made staying at a base camp and taking the apparatus to the field site for measurements is virtually impossible.

So, being young and adventurous, I decided that we would stay at the field site itself. We were at a very high altitude, around 5,500 meters in an area near the Sara Ugma Pass, and the Chhota Shigri glacier. That night, a huge snow storm started, one that had such fierce winds that my entire tent got uprooted, and I was moved away from my campsite. I was quite an ordeal, and I somehow survived it. The incident taught me that the mountains always have something new to teach you, and that to research glaciers, you must have an adventurous spirit and a strong survival streak.

How well are glaciers and glacial lakes in India inventoried? Does this data make it possible to predict or mitigate glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs)?

Overall, because of our excellent satellite program, the Himalayan glaciers and glacial lakes in India are quite well inventoried. Now, the big challenge is to reduce the risk of GLOFs or to mitigate the effects of one. To do this, we need to know the amount of water in the glacial lake – we know size of the lake via data on its aerial extent. By using various sonar techniques, we can also estimate the depth of such lakes. With this data, we can apply a hydrodynamic model to understand the consequences of a lake burst under different conditions – be it heavy rainfall, an avalanche or under natural ground subsidence. Knowing how much water is likely to be released downstream under these situations, one can assess probable damage and prepare for such situations.

Beyond this, it is also possible to mitigate the effects of a flood by simply reducing the amount of water in glacial lakes such that even in the event of an outburst, the damage downstream is minimal. Such projects are being undertaken in Sikkim by dewatering glacial lakes.

What is the likely impact of glacial retreat on runoff in the Himalayan rivers in the near future?

This is a very tricky question to answer, mainly because the amount of retreat is not equal across glaciers. So, when I look at this problem, I perceive it in two ways. One view is from the perspective of the small communities living in the mountains. The other viewpoint is of the people living in the plains, where the waters from the Himalayas come into the Indo-Gangetic plain, the fertile region where our agriculture and water security need to be sustained. The two situations are very different, and will fan out very differently.

People who live in the mountains, usually live around small streams fed by small glaciers of 4 – 5 Km length – they have agriculture and pastures there. These small glaciers are also the ones that are going to face the maximum effects of climate change in the near future. Some of our investigations have shown that from 1980s onwards, till now, almost 70% of such small glaciers have lost quite a lot of mass. One of the reasons for this is that there has been a reduction in snow cover. Snow melt has started to set in early, almost in the middle of winter, due to which many streams are drying up very early, and the whole ecosystem of the mountains is changing dramatically. I think we require a major program to understand the effects of climate change on the mountain communities, and to think of mitigation measures before it reaches a crisis stage.

With regard to the communities in the plains, that depend on the larger glaciers for water, the situation is also growing critical. For example, in Pakistan, almost 70% of the water that irrigates a vast majority of their agricultural plains comes from snow and glacier melt. If a significant number of such glaciers melt away, there is going to be a huge impact on the food and water security of the country. However, this may be quite far off in the future - it may not happen in this lifetime, or perhaps not even in the next two generations, but it will happen sometime in the future especially if climate change keeps on at the present pace.

Is it possible to mitigate glacier loss?

There have been some projects – called ice towers or ice stupas that are being tested in Ladakh and Sikkim. Such mitigation measures are important and hugely useful for small mountain communities, but their sustainability over an extended period of time is still under question. As temperatures keep rising with climate change, ice towers will also melt faster. But such projects do have the potential to mitigate water problems in places like Leh, Ladakh and perhaps Sikkim.

But this kind of mitigation is not going to be a solution at a large scale. In the Himalayas, we have about 40 to 50,000 square km of ice, and we cannot create snow and ice cover at that scale. So, it is crucial that we begin planning to take measures to create water security through other means for India.

Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?

I got interested in science very early on. My father was in railways and I grew up in small towns, where your group is limited and you don't have much to do on the weekends. So our idea of a fun time was establishing a lab and doing experiments. Since my father was an engineer, most of it was physics and chemistry. Every where we went, depending upon what I was studying or not studying or something that he had read about, we'd end up using one of our spare bedrooms to do experiments. And, it was fun! I knew I was going to do something with science but it just made more sense to me to go into medicine. By the time I finished medicine and my post-graduate training, I knew taking one patient at a time wasn't really enough for me. I wanted to go into research where you could think about doing things that are based more upon the principle than the practice of individual medicine.

What is the most exciting research you've been involved with in the past? Is there one thing you're currently working on that keeps you awake at night?

The most exciting research that I have been involved in is the development of Rotavirus vaccine. The reason it is exciting is that you spend an incredible amount of time and effort doing a study without knowing what the result is. And then one fine day you finally have enough to say, now we can see whether it worked or not. Given that my experience is largely one of failure it was pretty exciting to have one that succeeded.

To answer your second question, currently with oral vaccines with most enteric infections, we make products without understanding them. Other than polio we don’t have a correlate of protection for anything. We’re on a long road now to finding a correlate of protection for rotaviruses and novoviruses—20 years done and still plenty to do.

Who are your women role models and not necessarily in science?

I have two. One is a scientist, Mary Estes, with whom I did my postdoc. She is a molecular virologist at Baylor College of Medicine, USA who has done phenomenally well. Everybody in the field knows her and respects her. She is still active at the age of seventy and expects to continue. I think the year I spent with her really transformed me.

The other person is my mother, who kept working through many, many moves that my father had to make. She's always had that incredible attitude that nothing is impossible.

How easy or hard has it been for you to achieve a work life balance. And, how do you think institutions can help in this regard?

If you ask my family, they are likely to say that I don't have a work-life balance; I have a work life.

I think institutions that allow women to take care of their children by being flexible and providing on-site support services are very, very important. Some people will manage anyhow but you need for the median and above to manage as well.

Do women benefit from being mentored by older women and do they need to be mentored differently?

No question about their benefiting from older women mentors. When I started hiring in my lab, without realising, I actually ended up hiring women only. When we finally reached a stage when there were equal men and women graduate students, it was pointed out to me this was a new situation for the lab. For women I have mentored, I notice that time spent talking to successful women is what allows them to have the confidence that they can also do it. I think it really matters. And one of the issues is, the busier you get, the less time you have to spend at an individual level and you have to consciously try to overcome that.

Does your organisation have a cell or policy to address sexual harassment? Do you talk to your students and post docs about these issues?

I am new to the institute but yes, we do have such a cell. In fact, tomorrow we have gender training for all of the staff of the institute. And, that is something that I have asked to be a regular feature for new inductees as well.

Do you think there are particular structural road blocks that impede the progress of women in science?

There are plenty of cultural road blocks. Structural road blocks—like things around leave, having a lack of access to support facilities and a lack of structure flexibility in how people work. If you were to say you want to change your working time and the institution doesn't allow, it is one simple way of how systems don't allow you to function as you should be allowed to.

Would you say that through your career, things have become better for women in India?

I think things have definitely become better for women in India. I am starting to see more young women in science who are enthusiastic, who are not worried about needing to give it up in the near future. So I think things are better. Not ideal but improving.

One change that will hugely benefit the young women scientists who are just making their way in?

I think completely flexible timings would really help. And, institutionalise that, don't make it a favour.

One piece of advice that you wish some one had given you when you were starting out?

That's a tough one! Don't be afraid to say no. It took me a long time to learn that.