The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) announced the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards for 2022 after a delay of a year to 12 young scientists across the country. Immunologist Dipyaman Ganguli of CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata; microbiologist Ashwani Kumar from CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh; biologist Maddika Subba Reddy from the Hyderabad-based Centre for DNA Fingerprinting Diagnostics; Akkattu T Biju of Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru; and Debabrata Maiti of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay are among the awardees.
While Ganguli has been awarded in the field of medical sciences, Kumar and Reddy have received the prize for their contribution to biological sciences. Biju and Maiti have been awarded for their contribution to the field of chemical sciences. Ganguli has been awarded for important clinical and translational research in Covid-19, including a RCT. Ashwani Kumar has been awarded for his original contributions in biofilm-induced infections involving cellulose revealing a novel mechanism in TB pathophysiology.
Reddy has been awarded for his contributions in ascribing new functions to phosphatases in the regulation of cellular protein sorting pathways. Maiti has been awarded for contributions to developing transition-metal catalysis which has had a key impact in the agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals industry. In the 'Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences' category, Vimal Mishra from IIT-Gandhinagar has been selected for the prize. He is being awarded for examining the role of anthropogenic and natural factors on hydrologic extremes and water resources in India.
In the Engineering Sciences category, Dipti Ranjan Sahoo of Indian IIT-Delhi and Rajnish Kumar of IIT-Madras have received the award. Sahoo has been awarded for his contributions to mitigate seismic effects on buildings and bridges, while Rajnish Kumar has been recognised for contributions to carbon sequestration in solid hydrates and methane recovery from marine gas hydrates. In the field of Mathematical Sciences, Apoorva Khare of the Indian Institute of Science-Bengaluru and Neeraj Kayal from the Microsoft Research Lab India, Bengaluru have been selected for the prize.
Khare has been awarded for his contribution to the areas of representation theory, combinatorics and matrix analysis, while Kayal has been recognised for developing algorithms in algebra and number theory as well as novel techniques in arithmetic complexity. Anindya Das of the Indian Institute of Science-Bengaluru and Basudeb Dasgupta of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai have been selected in the Physical Sciences category.
The selectors have chosen Das for his contribution to advances in understanding the electrical and thermoelectric properties of strongly interacting 2-D atomically thin materials, while Dasgupta has been awarded for his pioneering research on coherent interactions of neutrinos in dense astrophysical environments and the nature of dark matter and the methodology for its indirect detection. The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, instituted in memory of the first Director General of the CSIR, is usually announced on the foundation day of the institution on September 26. The winners of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2021 included Kanak Saha, Kanishka Biswas, Amit Singh, Arun Kumar Shukla, T Govindaraju, Binoy Kumar Saikia, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Anish Ghosh, Saket Saurabh, Jeemon Panniyammakal and Rohit Srivastava.
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