View this email in the browser 08 Oct 2018
From the IBS Desk

Dear Readers,

Hope you all had a lovely and productive September. We have had an action-packed month, during which we brought you stories about the status of post-doctoral fellows in India, the importance of "jugaad" in scientific education and research, on bio-entrepreneurship, and on the murky ethical landscape surrounding clinical trials in India. You can find these stories linked below. We will soon begin our series on interdisciplinary science in India. If you have any interesting ideas regarding this, or better still, if you want to write for us, please email us at hello@indiabioscience.org. You can also reach us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We love hearing from you!

We would also like to bring to your notice a couple of surveys that are currently in progress, and which will hopefully bring to light some valuable data concerning the Indian scientific scenario. The first of these is being conducted by Sakshi Rana, a wildlife graduate student and freelance science journalist. This survey deals with the issue of scientific networking in India - something which we all know is highly important for building collaborations and advancing our research; yet find very few resources that provide guidance and support on the same. If you are a researcher at any stage of your career (faculty, student or post-doc), please participate here. We will publish the results of this survey in the form of an article on IndiaBioscience.

The second survey deals with the issue of career aspirations of STEM students in India, and is being conducted by the scientist duo of Shambhavi Nayak and Megha. The data from this survey would be extremely useful in understanding how science students perceive their future careers in India and what policy changes would best benefit them. Please participate, and share it with all the STEM students you know.

And now finally, here are all the stories we published last month.

News
A deadly frog killer in India
Fathima Athar

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), an aquatic fungus, has been implicated in the decline or extinction of nearly 200 frog species worldwide. Now for the first time, researchers have mapped and assessed the spread of this deadly pathogen in Indian frog populations, performing extensive field studies in locations ranging from the Himalayas to the Western Ghats to the Anadaman and Nicobar islands.

Genes and diet pair up to regulate lifespan
P Surat

It has long been known that diet can dynamically regulate lifespan in animals. In a new study using the nematode worm C. elegans as a model system, researchers from the National Institute of Immunology (NII) describe a new gene-diet pair which helps these worms maintain and preserve their lifespans while on diverse diets.

Columns
The curious case of the missing Indian postdoc
Shambhavi Naik & Megha

Postdoctoral fellows form the mainstay of research activities in many parts of the world, yet are curiously under-utilized and under-funded in Indian institutes. In this article, Shambhavi Naik, Research Fellow, Technology and Policy Programme, Takshashila Institution, and Megha, India Alliance Early Career Fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), examine possible causes and propose solutions to India’s persistent problems with retaining and attracting quality postdoctoral talent.

Using bio-entrepreneurship to solve indigenous problems
Sujoy Deb

Academician-turned-entrepreneur Priyangshu Manab Sarma speaks about his experience in tapping research leads generated in Indian labs to develop technologies to serve India's indigenous needs in a scalable and economically viable manner.

Special : Ethics in scientific research
Informed consent: Beyond forms and signatures
Vanshika Singh

'Informed consent' is the process which ensures that human participants in a research study are given comprehensive information about the study, which allows them to make a conscious decision on whether or not to be part of it. However, theory does not always translate into practice, and in a country as vast and diverse as India, implementing true informed consent sometimes becomes a challenging task.

When profits damn ethics: What ails clinical research in India?
Urvashi Bhattacharyya

Anant Bhan, bioethicist and global health & policy researcher, speaks to IndiaBioscience about the landscape of clinical trial malpractice in India and the need for pharmacovigilance, which is the science of monitoring, evaluating and understanding adverse effects associated with drugs and medical devices even after they have been released into the mass market

Education
Jugaad in science: effective biology practicals on a shoe-string budget
Anusha Krishnan

Running a lab and conducting experiments can be expensive. Globally, ingenious students and teachers have developed hacks for cheap science (including a 15 Rupee centrifuge!). We Indians are masters of "jugaad" - can we make scientific experiments accessible to all?

Education should enable youth to focus on local problems
Navodita Jain

Anil K Rajvanshi, Globe Awardee for Sustainability Research, talks about the need for orienting the education system to look for problems and solutions that might impact rural livelihood. In the current scientific scenario, it would offer students and scientific institutions an edge in impactful research.

Sixty percent of threatened Indian mammals are endemic
Navodita Jain

Kailash Chandra, Director of Zoological Survey of India gives a quantitative glimpse on the status of threatened species endemic to India. He also talks about the research fellowships and publications offered by the institute.

Grants
Travel Grant
Tata Trusts
Deadline: 31 March 2019
Cambridge International Scholarships
University of Cambridge
Deadline: 5 December, 2018

More Grants

Jobs
Team Lead/Research Scientist
National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS)
Deadline: 15 October, 2018
Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Assistant Professor
Manipal Centre for Natural Sciences, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)
Deadline: 12 October, 2018

More Jobs

Events
International Conference on Microbiome Research (ICMR 2018)
Pune, Maharashtra
Deadline: 15 October, 2018
Molecular neuroscience: From genes to circuits in health and disease
Bengaluru, Karnataka
Deadline: 25 October, 2018

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