6^th October 2022

Power Grid Corporation of India Limited, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and the Foundation for Science, Innovation and Development (FSID) at IISc have entered into a partnership to establish the POWERGRID Centre of Excellence in Cybersecurity in Power Transmission and Grid Operation.

This will be a nodal centre and a think tank where cybersecurity experts from academia, national R&D labs, and the industry will work together to address cybersecurity concerns related to power grids.

Mr K Sreekant, CMD of POWERGRID stated, “Cybersecurity in transmission and grid operations is critical in today’s digital era. Development of robust defences against cybersecurity is of paramount importance in maintaining reliable power supply. Continuous and collaborative research involving academia and industry for development of cyber resilient systems as well as capacity building is the need of the hour towards creating a safe and secure grid. POWERGRID, the largest transmission utility of the country, is happy to associate with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, for setting up the POWERGRID Centre of Excellence in Cybersecurity. POWERGRID is committed to provide funding to the extent of Rs 119.02 crores over the next 10 years and also depute its industry experts to this centre to bolster research in this area.”

“At IISc, our objective is to work with the industry to deliver cutting-edge research that can solve imminent problems for the industry. We are thankful for the support from POWERGRID to establish this Centre of Excellence in an area that is of critical interest to the entire nation,” said Prof Govindan Rangarajan, Director, IISc.

CONTACT: 

IISc Office of Communications | news@iisc.ac.in

11^th October 2022

Five outstanding scientists and engineers have been selected to receive the Distinguished Alumni Awards of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for the year 2022.   

The annual awards recognise exceptional contributions made by IISc alumni/ae to their profession, society and the Institute. The nominations received are evaluated by a committee chaired by the Director, IISc.   

This year’s awardees are Prof Bharat Kumar Bhargava, Col (Retd) HS Shankar, Dr Krishna Mohan Vadrevu, Dr Krishnan Nandabalan and Prof M Narasimha Murty.  

Prof Bharat Kumar Bhargava is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, USA. He has made pioneering contributions to cyber security, applied machine learning, and autonomous systems. One of the applications he has developed, for example, is a system to assist visually challenged people in navigating their environment and in social interactions, using mobile phones and cloud computing. He has also mentored a large number of students from underrepresented backgrounds. Prof Bhargava completed his BE degree from the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering in 1969.

Col (Retd) HS Shankar is currently the Chairman and Managing Director of Alpha Design Technologies Private Limited, Bengaluru. He has served in various field and operational units as well as in prestigious appointments in the army until his voluntary retirement in 1986. He received the Vishisht Seva Medal from the President of India for his distinguished service. He also served as the Director (R&D) at Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), where he spearheaded several indigenous R&D projects, before establishing Alpha Design Technologies, which is among the fastest growing defense R&D and manufacturing firms in India. He completed his ME from the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1973.

Dr Krishna Mohan Vadrevu is Executive Director at Bharat Biotech International Limited. He is known for his contributions to the development of indigenous vaccines for infectious diseases, including a typhoid conjugate vaccine, a novel low-dose rotavirus vaccine, and Covaxin, which was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has demonstrated effective leadership in managing teams of highly qualified scientists and engineers from different disciplines, and in taking new ideas and products from the lab to the market. Dr Vadrevu completed his PhD from the Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry in 1976.

Dr Krishnan Nandabalan is President and CEO of InveniAI LLC, and President and Co-founder of BioXcel Corporation. A successful entrepreneur, he has over two decades of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. He has established an AI-based technology platform to uncover novel biological connections from published scientific data in order to develop affordable treatments for diseases. The company he co-founded, BioXcel Therapeutics (NASDAQ-listed), is developing a drug candidate to treat aggressive forms of prostate cancer and advanced solid tumours that are refractory or treatment naïve to checkpoint inhibitors. Dr Nandabalan completed his PhD from the Department of Biochemistry in 1990.

Prof M Narasimha Murty is currently an Honorary Professor at IISc. He has made pioneering contributions to computer science, especially in the area of pattern recognition, with his publications having garnered a large number of citations. His contributions include a first-of-its-kind divide-and-conquer framework for clustering large datasets and a novel genetic K-Means algorithm. He has also been an exceptional mentor for Master’s and PhD students, and has served in several leadership positions at IISc. Prof Murty completed his BE and ME from the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1975 and 1978, and his PhD from the Department of Computer Science and Automation in 1982.

“We are delighted to confer this year’s Distinguished Alumni Awards upon five outstanding graduates of the Institute,” says Prof Govindan Rangarajan, Director, IISc. “We are extremely proud of the exceptional contributions made by the awardees to science and engineering, and to society. We hope that their accomplishments serve as an inspiration for young researchers to pursue excellence in their respective fields.”

The awardees will be honoured at an event to be held in December 2022, during which awardees from the years 2020 and 2021 will also be recognised.

CONTACT: 

Office of Communications, IISc | news@iisc.ac.in 

Office of Development and Alumni Affairs, IISc | alumniaffairs.odaa@iisc.ac.in

18^th October 2022

– Ranjini Raghunath

Large mammalian herbivores like the yak and ibex play a crucial role in stabilising the pool of soil carbon in grazing ecosystems such as the Spiti region in the Himalayas, according to a 16-year-long study carried out by researchers at the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES) and the Divecha Centre for Climate Change (DCCC), Indian Institute of Science (IISc).  

Experimental removal of grazing by herbivores from such ecosystems was found to increase the fluctuations in the level of soil carbon, which can have unintended negative consequences for the global carbon cycle.  

Since soil contains more carbon than all plants and the atmosphere combined, it is important to ensure its persistence. When plants and animals die, dead organic matter remains in the soil for a long duration before microbes break it down and release carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. “The soil pool is a reliable sink for trapping carbon,” explains Sumanta Bagchi, Associate Professor at CES and senior author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Maintaining stable levels of carbon in the soil is therefore key to offsetting the effects of climate change.  

Bagchi began studying the impact of grazing animals on Himalayan ecosystems during his PhD back in 2005. With support from the Himachal Pradesh state government, local authorities, and the people of the Kibber village in Spiti, he and his team established fenced plots (where animals were excluded) as well as plots in which animals like yak and ibex grazed. Over the following decade, he and his students collected soil samples from the region and analysed their chemical composition, tracking and comparing the levels of carbon and nitrogen in each plot year after year. 

From one year to the next, soil carbon was found to fluctuate 30-40% more in the fenced plots where animals were absent, compared to the grazed plots where it remained more stable each year. A key factor underlying these fluctuations was nitrogen. Depending on the soil conditions, nitrogen can either stabilise or destabilise the carbon pool. Grazing by herbivores, however, changes their interactions in ways that tip the balance in favour of the former, the researchers found.   

Many previous studies have focused on measuring carbon and nitrogen levels at long time intervals, assuming that the accumulation or loss of carbon is a slow process, explains Dilip GT Naidu, PhD student at DCCC and first author of the study. But the interannual fluctuations they noticed in their data paint a very different picture, he adds. These fluctuations can be consequential for climate as they are linked to how large mammalian herbivores influence soil.

Because grazing ecosystems make up about 40% of the Earth’s land surface, protecting the herbivores that keep the soil carbon stable should remain a key priority for mitigating climate change, the researchers suggest.  

“Both domestic and wild herbivores influence climate via their effects on soil carbon,” explains Shamik Roy, a former PhD student at CES and another author of the study. In ongoing research, Bagchi and his team are also assessing why domestic herbivores such as goat and sheep differ from their wild relatives in how they impact ecosystems. “Domestic and wild herbivores are very similar in many respects, but they differ in how they influence plants and soil. Understanding why they are not alike can lead us toward more effective stewardship of soil carbon,” Roy adds.  

REFERENCE: 

D. G. T. Naidu, S. Roy, S. Bagchi, Loss of grazing by large mammalian herbivores can destabilize the soil carbon pool. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(43), e2211317119 (2022). 

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2211317119 

CONTACT: 
Sumanta Bagchi 
Associate Professor  
Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES) 
Indian Institute of Science (IISc) 
sbagchi@iisc.ac.in 
080-22933528 

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: 

Long-term field experiment in the high-altitude Himalayan desert ecosystem in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh. Credit: Dilip Naidu.  

NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: 
a) If any of the text in this release is reproduced verbatim, please credit the IISc press release. 
b) For any queries about IISc press releases, please write to news@iisc.ac.in or pro@iisc.ac.in.

17^th November 2022

The conceptualisation of the Bengaluru Science and Technology (BeST) cluster is a collaborative effort of more than 50+ organisations, including major academic institutions, industry partners, start-ups, civil society organisations, and government bodies. 

A proposal for funding for the BeST cluster was submitted with Principal Investigator (PI) Prof Govindan Rangarajan (Director, IISc), and co-PIs Prof Ambarish Ghosh (Professor, IISc) and Dr Taslimarif Saiyed (CEO, CCAMP). The funding was recently sanctioned by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India. The BeST cluster was formally launched at the plenary session of the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2022, by the Honourable PSA, Prof Ajay Sood, in the presence of Prof G Padmanaban, former Director of IISc, and Shri S Gopalakrishnan (Kris), Co-founder, Infosys, on 16 November 2022.  

During the launch, Prof Sood emphasised that Bengaluru has enormous technological potential and that the Karnataka state is among the leaders in science and technology advancements. He anticipates that the BeST cluster will pave the path for the future success of such initiatives. 

A science and technology cluster is a collaborative ecosystem in a city or a region, in which scientists, engineers, social scientists, and entrepreneurs working in academia, government labs, and industry identify and collaborate to solve some socially relevant problems. Science & Technology (S&T) Clusters are being established as formal umbrella structures for S&T organisations in various cities to work together more effectively while retaining their autonomy. On the recommendation of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC) to build an Atmanirbhar Bharat through S&T, the Office of the PSA supports these initiatives.  

At the launch, co-Lead Dr Taslimarif Saiyed said, “Bangalore is a city of science, innovation and opportunity. The BeST Cluster launch could be a landmark moment for Science and Technology in India and possibly the world. We aim to bring together stakeholders with shared ecosystems, identify and address problems first with locally relevant solutions, but then scale up nationally and internationally by building globally competitiveness. BeST activities will be based on this ground-up pyramid model.”  

Co-Lead Prof Ambarish Ghosh said, “Bengaluru Tech Summit is the ideal launchpad for the BeST Cluster. The impact of the BeST cluster can be defined in many ways. In addition to immediate social and economic impact at a city scale, we must also consider the impact on sustainability and being globally competitive.” 

The Bengaluru Science and Technology (BeST) Cluster has identified Health & Wellness, Urban Life, and Futuristic Technologies as the sectors, and has set up teams to work in areas of OneHealth, Digital Health, Precision Agriculture, Urban Transportation, Monsoon & Climate Change, Quantum Technologies, Active Matter & Robotics, and Jet Engine. A Section 8 company is being set up to catalyse this collaboration as an independent body, provide organisational support, and raise and manage resources. 

CONTACT: 

IISc Office of Communications | news@iisc.ac.in 

BeST Office | office.best@iisc.ac.in 

2^nd December 2022

– Pratibha Gopalakrishna

The massive growth of data centres that consume enormous amounts of energy has contributed significantly to power shortages worldwide. With rising demand for faster and more intelligent computers and devices, there is a pressing need to develop alternatives to traditional electronic components that will make these devices more energy-efficient.

In two recent studies, researchers at the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE), IISc, report the development of a highly energy-efficient computing platform that offers promise in building next-generation electronic devices.

The CeNSE team who made the discovery. From left to right: Deepak, Navakanta Bhat, Sreetosh Goswami, Sreebrata Goswami and Santi Prasad Rath
Credits: CeNSE, IISc

Instead of using complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) which are the building blocks of most electronic circuits today, the team used components called memristors that can both store data and perform computation. By designing unique memristors based on metal-organic complexes, the team could cut down the number of components needed in a circuit, greatly increasing the speed and efficiency.

Images of the electronic platform used in the studies Credits: CeNSE, IISc

“We have now discovered a molecular circuit element that can capture complex logic functions within itself, facilitating in-memory computations in a smaller number of time steps and using much fewer elements than usual,” says Sreetosh Goswami, Assistant Professor at CeNSE who led both the studies published in Advanced Materials. Existing computing architectures process and store data at separate physical locations. The back-and-forth communication between two locations consumes the lion’s share of the computing energy. “We are resolving this problem by performing both computation and storage at the same physical location,” he says.

The platform “outperforms” current state-of-the-art technologies by orders of magnitude, adds Goswami. “We are [now] able to make arrays of devices that are more robust, consistent and stable even compared to commercial technologies like flash memories.”

Previously developed memristor-based circuits also suffer from limitations in speed and have a greater chance of errors accumulating because they carry out operations sequentially. The design of the new platform reduces the number of operational steps, increasing speed and reducing error, the researchers say.

The metal-organic complexes used to build their platform were designed by Sreebrata Goswami, Specialist Scientist at CeNSE. “These [complexes] are like electron sponges that can take and give away electrons for billions of cycles without degradation,” he says. By making small chemical modifications – adding or swapping out one or two ions in the complexes, for example – researchers might be able to adapt the same circuit for multiple functions.

When they built circuits that carry out mathematical operations and compared them with a typical CMOS circuit, the team found that the new platform offered 47 times higher energy efficiency and 93 times faster operating speed, while only taking up 9% of the physical footprint.

Moving forward, the team plans to connect the platform to a sensor – for example, a smartphone screen that senses touch – and study how efficiently the platform processes the data it collects. Santi Prasad Rath, a postdoctoral fellow at CeNSE who designed and fabricated the circuit along with PhD student Deepak, adds, “In an Internet of Things (IoT) platform, this computing technology can be extremely useful.”

Such efforts are critical because scientists believe that we are soon reaching the point where CMOS technology cannot be scaled up anymore in terms of efficiency or performance. “This necessitates the invention of new nanoscale device constructs to enable Moore’s Law over the next few decades,” says Navakanta Bhat, Professor at CeNSE and an expert in CMOS technologies. “The fact that an emerging molecular platform is outperforming a mature technology is quite significant. This is high-stakes research that can help shape the future of our national mission in semiconductor electronics.”

REFERENCES:

Yi SI, Rath SP, Deepak, Venkatesan T, Bhat N, Goswami S, Williams RS, Goswami S, Energy and Space Efficient Parallel Adder Using Molecular Memristors, Advanced Materials (2022).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202206128?af=R

Rath SP, Thompson D, Goswami S, Goswami S, Many‐Body Molecular Interactions in a Memristor, Advanced Materials (2022).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.202204551

CONTACT:

Sreetosh Goswami
Assistant Professor
Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE)
Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
sreetosh@iisc.ac.in

NOTE TO JOURNALISTS:

a) If any of the text in this release is reproduced verbatim, please credit the IISc press release.
b) For any queries about IISc press releases, please write to news@iisc.ac.in or pro@iisc.ac.in.

9^th December 2022

Following an agreement in August of this year, CELLINK and IISc have opened the doors to the country’s first 3D bioprinting Center of Excellence, which will focus on providing researchers tools to advance discoveries in tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and drug discovery

On 9 December 2022, CELLINK, the global leader in developing 3D bioprinters and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) opened the doors to the first 3D bioprinting Center of Excellence in the Indian subcontinent. Housed in the Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering (BSSE) at IISc’s Bengaluru campus, the CoE will provide access to 3D bioprinting systems, enabling researchers to accelerate their work across critical applications with the ultimate goal of improving health outcomes. The CoE was inagurated by Dr Ashwath Narayan CN, Minister of Electronics, Information Technology – Biotechnology, Science and Technology, Higher Education, Skill Development, Entrepreneurship and Livelihood in the Government of Karnataka; Prof Govindan Rangarajan, the Director of IISc; and Ms Tomoko Bylund, CELLINK’s Head of Sales – APAC. The event was also attended by Dr Vishal US Rao, Group Director and Dean, HCG Cancer Centre, Bengaluru. 

The CoE currently houses several CELLINK instruments, including the BIO X, BIO X6 and the BIONOVA X. It will now officially be accessible to the region’s current and future researchers. 

“This center of excellence offers the most cutting-edge and industry–leading 3D Bioprinting technology that we at CELLINK have developed, systems that will enable significant strides in research and in developing the future of health. We are extremely proud to be able to partner with IISc, an institute at the forefront of scientific research as can be seen by the new Medical School being led by Director Prof Rangarajan,” said Ms Tomoko Bylund.

“We are extremely pleased to partner with CELLINK to initiate efforts in this frontier technology which can greatly accelerate development of therapies, drug discovery, personalised medicine and many other applications that can have tremendous impact on human health,” said Prof Rangarajan.

Dr Ashwath Narayan congratulated CELLINK and IISc on this futuristic initiative and wished it success.

CONTACT: 
CELLINK: 

IISc:  
IISc Office of Communications | news@iisc.ac.in

 About CELLINK 

CELLINK is creating the future of health as part of BICO, the world’s leading bioconvergence company. When CELLINK released the first universal bioink in 2016, it democratized the cost of entry for researchers around the world and played a major role in turning the then up-and-coming field of 3D bioprinting into a thriving $1 billion industry. Today, the company’s best-in-class bioinks, bioprinters, software and services have been cited in over 700 publications and are trusted by more than 1,000 academic, pharmaceutical and industrial labs. At the forefront of the bioprinting industry, CELLINK aims to alleviate organ donor shortage with biofabricated transplantable organs and remains committed to reducing our dependence on animal testing and increasing efficiencies in drug development with more physiologically relevant bioprinted organ models. Visit cellink.com to learn more. BICO is listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm Main Market under BICO. 

 About BSSE 

Housed at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), India’s premier institution of higher learning and research, the Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering (BSSE) was founded in 2015 with a vision to develop and apply interdisciplinary approaches for understanding and manipulating biological systems. Since its inception, the Centre has been running a successful PhD programme in the broad area of Bioengineering. The programme was expanded to clinician-scientists, in collaboration with leading medical centres in the country. A new MTech programme in Bioengineering has been initiated in 2022.  Research at the Centre spans a spectrum of areas at the interface of biology and the physicochemical sciences, with a focus on problems of importance to clinicians and industry. 

26^th December 2022

India is uniquely placed to drive the agenda of S20 forward. Historically, this land has served as an incubator for ideas in different spheres of human life: political, social, economic, cultural and also scientific. The list of discoveries and innovations made over the centuries reveals India’s rich heritage of scientific inquiry – in architecture, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, textiles, ship building, town planning, textiles and more. For example, advances in chemical sciences many centuries ago allowed us to produce some of the highest grades of metals and alloys in the world.

With its intellectual heritage and current prowess in science and engineering, combined with a tradition of innovation with sustainability, India now has an opportunity to become a leader in disruptive science for development. The S20 summit is emblematic of India’s journey in forging a new path for advancement.

CONTACT:

Science 20 Secretariat
Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
secretariat.s20@iisc.ac.in