In our continuous pursuit to engage with the community, we are extremely delighted to launch a nation-wide survey to assess the current status of independent life science researchers in India.
The aim of this survey is to create actionable insights about the condition of independent investigators in India, which can then be used to influence and shape the direction of policy, discourse, as well as our own activities at IndiaBioscience.
The survey contains questions about the hiring and evaluation process, receiving and providing mentorship, funding, infrastructure and administrative support, and work environment.
If you are a faculty in an institution/university in India, please share your insights and experiences with us by participating in the survey. We also request the research community across career stages to widely circulate this survey within their networks.
The survey can be accessed here. Please note that this particular survey is meant for scientists and principal investigators (PIs) who lead their own labs (i.e. it is not designed to be filled by postdoctoral fellows or PhD students).
In addition, if you wish to write for us in our news and columns sections, email us a brief description of your story in ~100-200 words. To get instant updates of our upcoming podcasts, please subscribe to our IndiaBiospeaks podcast channel on Spotify and other popular podcast apps. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to enjoy all webinars in one place and to our newsletter to get the latest updates. You can write to us at hello@indiabioscience.org and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Scroll down for highlights of our recent activities.
The second conversation of the 'In Conversation with IGNITE' series is with a well-known biochemist and cell biologist Ronald David Vale from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco. Jyotsna Dhawan, the CEO of the Indian science funding charity, DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance and a Board Member of the IGNITE Life Sciences Foundation, will be the interlocutor.
Aliferous Beginnings: A career counselling session
Last month, Zill-e-Anam, Program Coordinator - Outreach, was invited to a career counselling session: Aliferous Beginnings by Shaheed Rajguru College of Applied Sciences for Women, University of Delhi. Zill-e talked about her journey in science and ways to seek internships at undergraduate level.
A picture is worth a thousand words
Shantala Hari Dass, Associate Director, spent an evening (virtually) at her alma mater talking to some of the Honours Program students at the Department of Life Sciences, St Xavier's College Mumbai about the utility of graphical abstracts in communicating scientific findings.
Let's Talk Science Careers
The CSIR-IMTECH Student Science Club recently conducted a 'by the students, for the students' science festival called CURIO-2022. Shantala Hari Dass was invited to be a part of this festival and talk to the students about careers in science.
In the fourth article as part of community voices for international grants and fellowships, Karishma shares an experience of a cold email that she wrote leading to a collaborative South - South international grant.
Mahesh Sankaran is Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru where he heads the Community and Ecosystems Ecology lab. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2021 for Life Sciences, the first ecologist to have won this prestigious award. In this interview, he talks about his work on grasslands and climate change, and on winning the Infosys Prize.
Season 2 of 'In Conversation with a Mentor' kickstarts with Abhishek Goel, Co-founder, and CEO of Cactus Communications. Together with his brother Anurag Goel, Abhishek co-founded Cactus Communications in 2002, focusing on providing English editing services for researchers in Japan. It is an international enterprise with a head office in Mumbai and offices in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, and many other cities serving customers from over 173 countries.
The first conversation of the 'In Conversation with IGNITE' series was with Ajit Varki, Distinguished Professor of Medicine, and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, at UCSD and Executive Co-Director of the UCSD/Salk Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny.
Many misconceptions can creep into an undergraduate student's mind as they study gene expression in their classrooms. In continuation with an earlier discussion on the common misconceptions in gene expression, in this article, educator Maya Murdeshwar from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai highlights some of the misconceptions around the process of translation – the process of building a polypeptide chain based on genetic information.
COMMUNITY BUILDING
IndiaBioscience Outreach Grant (IOG) Awardee Informative Session
IndiaBioscience hosted a small-group informational session for the IOG Awardees. This informal chat, with Spoorthy Raman, focussed upon engaging with media and publicising their outreach projects. This was the first of three such dedicated sessions for the IOG Awardees.
We continue to update this interactive map/table showing the geo-distribution of life science researchers in India. The data that populates this resource is collected from a survey among the life scientists in India and published here with their informed consent. If you are a life scientist in India and if you would like to be featured on this database, please fill this form.
