According to you, what are the key qualities that a leader should have?

A leader is a person with dreams and the desire to make a difference. A leader will always act first, even if they don’t know the outcome. I think taking risks makes a leader. A leader jumps right ahead with instinct, intuition, and responsibility.

How and where did you pick up the leadership traits/​skills necessary to bring you where you are now? Was there a point in your career that made you realise that you were on the path to becoming a leader?

I did not dream or plan to be a leader. It just happened that I was put in leadership roles. So whenever people ask me questions about leadership, I say I just did what I had to do.

Leadership is about daring to do unconventional things

Professionally, it isn’t easy to decide what to do when you set out to become a scientist. First, you go after what attracts you; later, you may reject it. But if you have the courage to discard what you once thought was worth it, that gives you the strength to build on what you really want to do; it allows you to grow with the changing landscape of your own evolution.

I also think that leadership is about daring to do unconventional things. For example, when I was offered the CEO position at Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance, I was not sure why I was selected because I did not have any experience as an administrator. However, I accepted it because I thought I could make a difference. I believed we needed that kind of an organisation in India where we could have competitive funding and Grants to carry out quality research to support scientific excellence.

I had to set up an office in a city I had never lived in and start from scratch —find an office space, recruit staff, and implement the program. So, this kind of role teaches you a lot because it takes you out of your comfort zone, and you must strive to learn. So, I realised that leadership might come with a lack of specific knowledge in new areas.

The next challenge I had to take up was when I was asked to become the Vice-Chancellor of Presidency University — something very different from whatever I had done previously. The steepest learning curve of my career came after I became the Vice-Chancellor. I think that a lifetime of experience and the opportunity to do something unknown inspired me to take up this challenge.

What would you consider your biggest success?

My biggest successes have been in facing completely unknown territories. When I started as a PhD scholar, I had no clue about what I was heading in for. The PhD and postdoc years were difficult, but it was even more difficult to set up my lab, get grants and guide students. I think reaching the level where I successfully published papers with graduate students was one of my earliest successes.

Then, setting up the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance had its share of challenges. Apart from that, Presidency College had just become a university, and I had to lead a new university. These were all challenges that I think I succeeded in (at least partly).

What are some instances where you faced failure, and what have these taught you?

Failure has been a part of my life every single day! But it’s only for that one day. The moment you fail, you will find ways to overcome it because you now understand what doesn’t work.

Failures are as you perceive them

I remember the first ‘failure’ I had in the first three years of my PhD tenure. None of our experiments or data proved the hypothesis. Later it turned out that our initial assumption was incorrect. Failure taught me to pursue a different approach.

So, failures are as you perceive them. But, if we take the time and have the patience to read the data without preconceived notions, we can truly turn them around into a success.

How much value, as a leader, do you give to human relationships?

You can’t do anything without people. The hardest thing that you learn in the process is how to manage and understand the people you’re working with. I like building teams and allowing individuals the independence to perform responsibly so that they learn and grow.

I have always relied heavily on my team, and they have relied on me.

How do you manage to keep your team happy and motivated?

By letting them participate and take risks.

Everyone is important; they should feel they are a part of what you are doing. Avoiding a person never works because you end up crippling one arm of your organisation. You have to spend time with different people, and sometimes you have to give them more attention. A leader must have enormous resilience, patience, and the desire to be inclusive.

How do you deal with difficult people or situations?

While working in a team, you must first learn how to identify who will be difficult to work with! Rejecting a person because they are difficult never works. If you do that, you make them feel humiliated, and they will not function that way. Instead, it is best to subtly coax a person to be interactive and to perform. Help him overcome his challenges without confrontation.

What do you think would be the best way to learn leadership skills for an aspiring leader?

There is no textbook for it. Every person has to face a different path. But if you think about the common denominator in leadership, it is to have a desire and to act on that desire without measuring the difficulty. If you desire to do something, you will instinctively find a way to do it, and along the path, you will also see that a lot of support and help comes to you.

One cannot be a leader by wanting something and sitting on an armchair just talking about it

A true leader should not bother with the “ifs”; they shouldn’t keep questioning if they will be accepted. They deal with challenges even if they don’t know how to deal with them. People should be courageous dreamers who desire to do things and then go ahead and try to accomplish those dreams. Leaders must be energetic. One cannot be a leader by wanting something and sitting on an armchair just talking about it; one has to do the work. People will give you advice and offer criticism, but doing the actual work is tough work, and you are the one that has to do it.

Most leaders don’t know they are leaders; they do it just because they have a desire and an intuition to do something. And if that particular dream is ‘the right dream’, it cannot be something far removed from reality where people don’t benefit from it.

For scientific and academic environments, what role do you think leadership plays, and how important is it to have an able leader at the helm?

For scientific or academic environments, I think whoever is in a leadership role must have clarity. It would help if you had a roadmap of where you want to see your organisation. The leader as an individual does not matter; it is the institution that matters. For example, it was with this purpose that I took up this role in Presidency – to deliver a university with academic excellence. If it was academic excellence that we are striving for, then, in that case, I cannot make compromises on it because of any other peripheral factors that might create pressure.

At one level, you have to accept that you will be a very unpopular person, but I found out that unpopularity doesn’t matter. So along with academic excellence, I maintained that there should be freedom of expression, a transparent faculty selection policy, and a fair recruitment and student admission process. All these things promote good ethical practices.

So, to sum it all up, what would be the most important principle of leadership according to you?

To have the courage and honesty to implement your vision or dream!

You recently received the prestigious Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) grant of 1 million dollars to pursue your work on epidermis development. Can you describe the research that helped you win this grant?

I work in the field of mechanobiology, where I combine the tools of physics and biology to answer the questions about how the mammalian epidermis develops. I completed my Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT-KGP), combining microfluidics and cancer biology. There, I was first introduced to the world of epidermis development. Later, I did my post-doctoral research in the lab of Prof. Joachim Spatz, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Dept. Cellular Biophysics University of Heidelberg. In his lab, I focused on understanding the biophysics of epithelial cell migration. When I joined TIFR, Hyderabad, I committed myself to discover the mechanisms of cell migrations and cell division in a multilayer setup. Here, I decided to answer the question of multilayer epidermis formation in the mammalian system. My previous experience had helped me understand the biomechanics of the unilayer of epidermis development, but now I wanted to know the dynamics behind multilayer epidermis formation. You might ask, what's the difference between monolayer and multilayer development of mammalian epidermis? Well, till now, we know that multilayers of cells display a different molecular identity than cells that are unilayer, and that there is a mechanical drive behind how this multilayer of cells progresses to form the epidermis. This novel quest of deciphering epidermis development through an understanding of the dynamics of multilayer cell development fetched us the HFSP grant this year.

How crucial was the research topic in getting the funding?

When it comes to research ideas for HFSP, the keywords are risk and fundamental questions. In our case, our research idea and the hypothesis involved answering questions with considerable risk. Although we stand on the shoulders of giants, our topics are still relatively untested in the scientific community. For a long time, epidermis development has been seen through the eyes of fixed tissue, but rarely are the dynamics behind this phenomenon noticed. My team aims to clear the murky waters of multilayer epidermis dynamics with a completely new approach of using mouse embryonic stem cells and skin embryoids. Our topic is both fundamental in nature as well as untested for any other funding agency to grant us money. The HFSP recognizes such topics and invests readily to help scientists like us take them further.

How did your team and research come together? Which came first – the team or the question?

My team comprises two long-known companions, Friedhelm Serwane from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, and Dapeng "Max" Bi from Northeastern University, Boston. It was almost simultaneously that the research idea and the team came together. The idea of working with the epidermis was always there. Then came Max. Being a theoretical physicist, he added the concepts of cell competition and cell mechanics to my question and offered to further dissect the mechanism through his computational models. On the other hand, Friedhelm offered his ferrofluid droplet technology for understanding the viscoelastic properties of cells during division and migration. The addition of my team members improved the perspective of my question, which I think helped us in getting the grant.

In what ways did you ensure that each team member brought a novel approach while building a proposal?

In my lab, we work with elastic properties of the epidermis, where we follow cell dynamics in monolayer conditions. When I collaborated with Friedhelm, he suggested that we understand the fluidic properties of the epidermal cells too, as they behave more like sheets when in multilayer. His approach of using ferrofluids in the magnetic field would give us an upper hand in studying the fluidic properties of the cell. On the other hand, Max utilized his expertise in the physics behind cell shape and size to fine-tune the problem. He brought computational power to the table. His idea was to build a robust model, using the biological data that Friedhelm and I were going to give, that would predict essential factors responsible for proper multilayer of epidermis development. All three of us had defined roles. However, the success of the grant was because although we all brought together different approaches, we kept the project's objective unified. Each member of our team is a vital cog in solving this puzzle. Hence, we decided not to segregate our objectives but rather keep them together and answer collectively in a thematic fashion.

How did you ensure that your team was well balanced?

I realized earlier that my team would consist of individuals who use an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems of cell dynamics. The HFSP also insisted that the team should be intercontinental in nature. These criteria helped me narrow down to Max and Friedhelm, who work in North America and Europe, respectively. I now understand that the principal investigator must address the scientific problem upfront and identify the best people who may answer the problem in their own manner. Both of my team members brought in expertise which was essential for the success of the grant.

How and when did you start thinking about applying for HFSP?

I started working on the grant in January 2021. I focussed on including innovative and collaborative elements in the grant. With collaborators on board, we started working towards the letter of intent due to be submitted in early April. When it comes to HFSP, a letter of intent is considered for the initial screening of applicants. We kept the brief description of our project concise with elements of risk and solid rationale supporting our hypothesis. After we were selected in July, we began the tenacious process of writing the main grant proposal. The three time zones we all were in also helped in our cause, as we all spent substantial amounts of time scrutinizing each other's work. This improved the writing quality of the proposal and the question we asked in the process. For example, we started initially by working on the monolayers of the epidermis. As discussions and inputs from my team went on, we proposed using the epidermis multilayer to answer the questions. As we approached the deadline, we started putting in more inputs and the proposal was constantly under watch, improving its quality significantly. Writing a risky proposal for HFSP meant relying less on proof-of-concept and more on innovation and a will to go beyond what we currently do to answer a fundamental question in biology.

Any advice for prospective HFSP applicants from India?

They must actively work on the concept and consider their area of expertise for their input to be essential. In most collaborations, there is usually one major contributor and several supporting members. In the case of HFSP, that will not function. Every team member should play a critical role in the project; otherwise, it would be incomplete. Another aspect to consider is that, while the HFSP requires that what you propose to accomplish be distinct from what your lab is currently doing, reviewers must also be convinced that you can carry out your proposal. It's critical to strike a balance between these two seemingly opposing features.

You were recently awarded the Infosys Prize for Life Sciences for your pioneering work on tropical savanna ecosystems and for research that permeated into policy. Can you tell us about your experiences on this path?

I worked in the computer science field for a couple of years before I realised I did not want to pursue it as a career. Since there were very few places in India that offered degrees in ecology at that time, I did my Master’s at Auburn University in the US in Wildlife Biology and PhD from Syracuse University. The fieldwork for my PhD was in the amazing ecosystem of Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in southern India. This was my first serious exposure to fieldwork. My postdocs were in the UK and the US, with fieldwork in the savanna ecosystems of Africa. I moved to India in 2009, where my work expanded from grassland ecosystems to forests. Some long-term research continues in Africa.

Around 2015–16, I got involved with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Later, I was also a reviewer-editor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Last year, I was part of a one-of-its-kind joint workshop of IPBES and IPCC. This workshop highlighted the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services and why we need to consider them in dealing with climate change.

When we think of India’s natural landscapes, the word ‘forest’ may come to mind, but not so much the words ‘savanna’ and ‘grassland’. Can you tell us something about these tropical grassy biomes in India and how they differ from forests?

Tropical grasses are C4 grasses, that is, they use a different photosynthetic pathway than trees. ‘Savanna’, as is currently defined in literature, is a system where trees are interspersed in a C4 grass matrix.

Grasslands and savannas were classified from a forest perspective by colonial foresters in India in the 1800s. Many are wrongly called dry thorn scrubs, open or dry deciduous forests. In India, majority of these biomes today have been transformed to other land uses and are facing many challenges since they are easy to clear and some of them are quite fertile.

Overall, people seem to value forests more than grasslands. There is a term for this – biome awareness disparity. But grasslands are biomes in their own right and support many charismatic megafauna such as the great Indian bustard. Nearly 1/5th of the world’s population depends on them.

What is the connection between grassy biomes and climate change?

Less than 5% of the plants on Earth are C4 grasses. While they occupy a very small fraction of plant diversity, they contribute to almost 25% of the global carbon cycle. Droughts, which are predicted to become more frequent due to climate change, cause trees to die and release carbon into the atmosphere. Since most of the carbon is below the ground in grasslands, during a drought, it stays below ground. It is argued that grasslands are thus more consistent and reliable carbon stores. Climate mitigation ventures such as tree plantation activities on grasslands can sometimes harm the ecosystem and be counter-productive. When it comes to their role in the carbon cycle, policy managers need to see what is below the ground and not just focus on above-ground carbon.

What would you put in your wishlist for policy changes in India for grassland conservation?

My wishlist would include a greater appreciation of grasslands, recognition of the ecosystem services they provide and greater protection for them. Protection does not always mean designating grasslands as Protected Areas, such as National Parks, where human activities, fire and grazing are banned. Protection can also mean restoring grasslands and not allowing ill-conceived tree planting activities.

You are the first scientist from the ecological sciences to have been awarded the esteemed Infosys Prize. What are your thoughts on the recognition of Indian ecological research outside academia and in mainstream society?

It was an honour to receive the Infosys Award and gratifying to know it was given to somebody from the ecological sciences. Ecology is still a niche field in India and although there are more ecologists today, the number is still small. Hopefully, this recognition will make people aware that there are opportunities in ecology, climate and sustainability science. In terms of awareness outside academia, I think scientists need to do more to communicate their research, on more accessible platforms, particularly at the vernacular level. Also, there is a need for colleges in India to offer undergraduate courses in ecology.

Any advice for young ecologists?

We have some really great ecologists in the country today and more institutes offering courses in ecology. But many tend to work in evolution, behavioural and population-level ecology; few study larger-scale systems like climate modelling, energy and water cycles. Ecologists need to address these questions since they are critical in today’s world. My further advice – read, read, read! Also, spend more time in the field. Only when you spend time in the field can you reach a greater depth of understanding of ecological processes.

How can we interest the future generation to take up stewardship of our Earth?

Immersion is key here since we learn through experiential and immersive learning. It is also critical that schools introduce nature and Earth education early, not just as classroom learning, but through, say, citizen science activities. Having undergraduate programs that bring technological, ecological and social aspects together is important. We have excellent young minds. We just need to engage them to work on planetary problems.

What are your observations on the trajectory of ecological research in India?

It has been very positive since India has a lot more early-career ecologists of excellent cadre. But we need more. In terms of ecological research, we as a country seem to have lagged behind others in setting up long-term research monitoring programs. The Ministry of Environment and Forests has approved long term ecological observatories and that is a good sign, as it is better to start late than never.