Dr. Gautam Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University. He heads the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) and is currently the Dean (Research) at Ashoka University. He was recently appointed a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on “Strengthening the use of Epidemiological Modelling of Pandemic Diseases” and as a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on “Embedding Ethics in Health and Climate Change Policy”. He was awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowship by the DST in 2005, and was named a DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Investigator in 2010. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India in 2019. Dr Menon specialises in Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology.  He serves on the scientific review committees of several international and national agencies, including the Human Frontier Science Program and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance. His current research focuses on several biophysical problems, including the study of nuclear architecture, axonal transport, collective cell migration and cell adhesion. 

Dr Vini Gautam is the group leader of the NeuroElectronics group at CeNSE, IISc, Bangalore. She is listed as one of the 40 most influential Asian Australians in Australia (2020). Her group focuses on the application of engineering and technology to solve some of the most challenging questions about understanding, modulating and engineering brain function.  She was awarded the ACT Young Tall Poppy 2018 by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science in “recognition of the achievements of Australia’s outstanding young scientific researchers and communicators”. She has led multiple cross-disciplinary projects, from developing photodetectors to stimulate blind retinal tissues to creating nano-scaffolds for studying and engineering neural circuits in a dish.

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Prof. Thomas J Pucadyil is a biology Professor at IISER Pune. He obtained his PhD from CCMB, Hyderabad. His lab focuses on discovering membrane remodelling proteins and understanding their mechanistic and regulatory aspects. The group uses novel supported membrane templates with tunable compositional and topological properties to mimic cell membranes and analyse these protein machines in action. Pucadyil’s lab combines biochemistry and cell biology to discover such protein machines, analyse their mechanism and learn about their functions in living systems.

Prof. (Dr) Prakriti Tayalia is a faculty member at IIT Bombay. She has a PhD in applied physics and bioengineering from Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. The Indian Immunology Society awarded her the Outstanding Immunologist Award in 2022. She was recently conferred the C1973 Research Excellence Award (in research and innovation) in 2024. Her research group investigates designing, synthesising, and characterising biomaterials and scaffolds for a variety of applications, including tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and immunotherapy, as well as developing in vitro 3D physiologically relevant models and biomimetic materials for studying cellular behaviour. Her lab is actively involved in developing various kinds of material-based systems for replicating and understanding in vivo physiological phenomena. 

Dr Sudha Rajamani is a biology Professor at IISER Pune. She obtained her PhD (Biochemistry) in 2002 from the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi. She subsequently joined the Fink lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), USA, for postgraduate research focused on Parkinson's Disease. A shift in her career path led her to the field of Astrobiology. She began this new direction with a postdoctoral position at the Deamer lab at UCSC, followed by another postdoctoral role at the FAS Centre for Systems Biology at Harvard University. Her lab employs tools from a few different areas of science, including geochemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology, to address one of the most fundamental questions in science about how life originated on our planet.

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Dr Imroze Khan is an evolutionary biologist. His work focuseson understanding the selective forces that determine the adaptive evolution of immune responses. He completed his doctoral studies in Evolutionary Biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. Before joining Ashoka, Dr Khan was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore and a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin. His research combines diverse approaches – the use of experimental evolution and life history analyses and physiological and molecular manipulations to assess evolutionary and ecological outcomes.

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Dr Shishir Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Hyderabad. He obtained his PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. His group focuses on applying graphene in nanofiltration, nanofluidics, and biological and chemical fields by manipulating and analyzing microscale mass processing. His work provides insights into micro-nanofluidics and their extensive applications in nanopores, 2D materials, biochemical sensors, biomedical devices, sensors, AI/ML, and nanoscience and technology.

Dr Swapnil Rane is a Professor at Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai. He completed his MBBS at Seth G.S. Medical College and KEM Hospital, Mumbai, in 2006, followed by an MD in Pathology from PGIMER, Chandigarh, in 2010. Dr Rane also holds an MRes from King’s College London and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists. His research group focusses on the integration of pathology and computational methods to develop AI and machine learning tools that enhance the histopathological analysis of various cancers.

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