Simons Centre members awarded two Infosys-TIFR "Leading EDGE" Research Grants

We're very pleased to share that three faculty and one post-doctoral fellow from the Simons Centre at NCBS have been awarded two independent Infosys-TIFR "Leading EDGE" Research Grants, along with colleagues from TIFR-Mumbai and TIFR-Hyderabad.

Dr. Shashi Thutupalli, Dr. Sandeep Krishna, and Dr. Jimreeves David (postdoctoral fellow), all working at the Simons Centre at NCBS, along with Dr. Prasad Perlekar of TCIS-TIFR, Hyderabad have been awarded an Infosys-TIFR "Leading EDGE" Research Grant for their proposal, Microbial populations on complex visco-elastic substrates: Population structure and metabolic organisation. Their project aims to apply an interdisciplinary approach for understanding the coupled roles of mechanics and chemistry in the growth dynamics of microbial populations on visco-elastic substrates.

Dr. Shachi Gosavi of Simons Centre at NCBS, along with Dr. Hariharan Narayanan and Dr. Piyush Srivastava of STCS, TIFR, Mumbai, has also been awarded an Infosys-TIFR "Leading EDGE" Research Grant for their proposal, Studying RNA structure and dynamics using machine learning techniques. Their project aims to solve RNA-based biophysical questions using computational and mathematical approaches. The project will involve both designing of machine learning tools for answering these biophysical questions as well as implementing and evaluating these tools.

Both these projects bring together experts spanning a variety of disciplines and rely on interdisciplinary approaches that blend theory and experiment for solving fundamental biological problems, which is a guiding principle behind most work being carried out at the Simons Centre at NCBS.

The Infosys-TIFR “Leading Edge” research grants have been set up for encouraging bold, high-risk, high-reward, and interdisciplinary research emerging from collaborations across disciplinary silos. The grant aims to provide the pilot funding for cutting-edge, relevant and rigorous research projects for a duration of up to 2.5 years, in order to seed new lines of scientific enquiry bearing exceptional promise. The grant hopes to drive breakthrough discoveries in Indian science and foster rich long-term collaborations within diverse disciplines and centres of the TIFR community.

The first cycle of Infosys-TIFR “Leading Edge” Research Grants were awarded to four project proposals in October 2021, and members of the Simons Centre at NCBS have been recipients of two out of these four grant awards.