Top Honours: Scientists Receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar CSIR Prize
Top Honours: Scientists Receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar CSIR Prize
On 26th September, CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 7 categories to 10 scientists. This prize is a science award given by the CSIR each year for outstanding applied or fundamental research in 7 key areas namely biological sciences, chemical sciences, earth/atmosphere/ocean and planetary sciences,engineering sciences, mathematical sciences, physical sciences and medical sciences.
This award was constituted in 1958 and it was named after the founder Director of CSIR and first Chairman of the UGC, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar. This coveted prize has been won by 10 brilliant scientists this year. The rules for awarding this prize are as follows. This prize can be awarded to Indian citizens engaged in fields of science and technology, who are not older than 45 years. This prize is given for contributions to work carried out in India, within 5 years of being awarded the prize. The prize includes a citation, a plaque and a cash award of Rs. 5 lakh. In addition, the scientists who are awarded this prize also get USD 250 per month till they reach the age of 65.
Each discipline also has multiple winners of up to 2 scientists. This year, the awardee for the biological sciences category was Roop Mallik from the TATA Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. For Chemical sciences, the award went to Kavirayani Ramakrishna Prasad of the IIsC (Indian Institute of Science) Bengaluru and Souvik Maiti from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) at New Delhi. For the earth,atmosphere, ocean and planetary sciences, the winner was Sacchida Nand Tripathi from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
For the engineering sciences category, the winners were Soumen Chakrabarti from IIT Mumbai and S. Venkata Mohan from the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT) in Hyderabad. For mathematical sciences, the winner this year was Indian Institute of Science's Kaushal Kumar Verma from Bengaluru. For medical sciences, the award was given to Anurag Agrawal from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology at New Delhi.
For the physical sciences category, the winners were Pratap Raychaudhari of the TIFR in Mumbai and Sadiqali Abbas Rangwala from the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru. Scientists have won these awards on the strength of their amazing and pathbreaking contributions to the world of science. For instance, S. Maiti the winner of the chemical sciences category prize has been researching anti-cancer molecules. He has discovered how a certain class of organic molecules can stop the activity of genetic material called micro-RNA and halt the progression of certain types of cancer.
Another winner of the prize, Soumen Chakrabarti has been working towards making search engines online smarter. Each of these scientists is involved in making life easier and better for human beings. Prizes such as these are a good way to appreciate and acknowledge their efforts.
