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PhDs of India, Bangalore (2026)

23/09/2026

“Research was never part of some grand plan I had made for myself as a school kid. I chose science in high school because I loved mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, and eventually found my way to computer science. During my undergraduation studies, I fell in love with the subject. But it was only when I joined IISc for my Master’s that I began to understand what research actually meant and discovered the beauty of deeply exploring challenging problems and uncovering new ideas.
Professors there taught us to think, to sit with a question, challenge assumptions and find ways of answering something that did not already have an answer. After my Master’s, however, I didn’t immediately pursue a PhD. I joined Xerox Research in Bangalore. I had a permanent, well-paying job, was doing research and writing papers, and life was comfortable. Then came the slightly irrational question: if I am already doing research and writing papers, why not do a PhD on something concrete? There was one very rational reason not to; moving from industry to a PhD would financially be a bad decision.
My parents understandably asked why I would leave a secure job. I asked myself the same thing many times. However, I started planning to start a PhD in IISc and also applied for a Google PhD Fellowship. Somehow luck worked! I received both the fellowship and a PhD position at IISc. Receiving a Google PhD Fellowship made the decision easier, and I returned to IISc to work with the same advisor, Professor Narahari Yadati, I had known during my Master’s. I was also extremely lucky to have Professor Siddharth Barman as a co-supervisor. I also consciously chose to do my PhD in India. I knew going abroad could bring greater visibility and a wider network, but I knew my environment here. I trusted my advisors, had friends and family around me, and felt confident that this was where I could do my best work. That support later mattered more than I realised then.
My research was in fair algorithms for multi-agent decision-making, essentially asking how resources or recommendations could be allocated when multiple people want different things, while still providing mathematical guarantees of fairness. But the hardest problem during my PhD wasn’t necessarily designing algorithms. It was figuring out which problem was worth solving. Fairness in algorithms was still an emerging area. It felt like standing in front of an enormous ocean; there were interesting questions everywhere, yet finding one that was both non-trivial and actually solvable was incredibly difficult.
Early in my PhD, I became obsessed with finding the big problem, the problem that would define my thesis. That pressure took a toll. There were periods when I questioned intensely whether I was doing anything meaningful. Whenever research wasn’t going well, the alternative looked especially attractive: I could have stayed at Xerox Research; I could have been earning well; I could have had a stable job without constantly wondering whether a problem I had spent months thinking about would lead anywhere. That cycle of excitement, doubt, progress, doubt again, happened many times. By the end of my PhD, though, I understood something I wish I had understood at the beginning. A PhD does not have to be one spectacular problem.
The real training is learning how to keep going when you don’t know whether a problem has an answer. It is learning patience, communication and time management. It is learning how to recognise a useful question, learn from the failed attempts, and start again without treating that as failure. I was fortunate to have excellent advisors and a collaborative laboratory. My seniors made the laboratory feel like a community, we discussed research, collaborated, celebrated birthdays and had fun together.
I got married during the second year of my PhD. I had close friends from my Bachelor’s and Master’s in Bangalore, and I lived outside campus. Having people with whom I could talk, complain, laugh and completely disconnect from research gave me a grounding base. I think PhD students sometimes underestimate how important that is.
One of the most transformative experiences of my PhD happened far away from IISc, at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. Suddenly I was in the same space as Turing Award winners and Fields Medalists, people whose names we knew from foundational textbooks. I assumed students like us would never simply walk up and talk to them. Apparently, they knew that too. At the first dinner, some of these extraordinary scientists went from table to table themselves, talking to students. They spoke not only about their successes, but about mistakes, uncertainty and the difficult periods of their own careers. That week changed something for me. I saw the humility behind some of the biggest names in computer science, and realised that excellence and humility can, and should, go hand in hand.
When you are struggling during a PhD, it is easy to imagine that successful scientists somehow travelled a cleaner path. Meeting people at the very top of their fields and hearing them speak so normally about failure made me realise that uncertainty is not evidence that you don’t belong in research. It is part of research.
That is also why I think prospective PhD students should investigate something far more important than a professor’s publication count- the environment in which those papers were produced. Talk to current students. Talk to graduates. If possible, talk to people who left the laboratory and their experience. Ask what happens when research doesn't go as planned, when students disagree with the advisor, or when a project stops working. An advisor's support can profoundly shape a student's PhD journey. Of course, sometimes issues become apparent only over time; I feel institutions would benefit from a more transparent system that allows students to change advisors when a relationship genuinely isn’t working, without making the process feel adversarial or punitive. And once you begin a PhD, look beyond your own laboratory. Attend workshops, summer schools, conferences, and international forums. Meet researchers outside your immediate field. Some of the most important things you gain during a PhD may come from conversations that never appear in your thesis.
After IISc, I moved to Harvard for my PostDoc. My work also began moving from theory towards more practical problems. I started collaborating with nonprofit organisations in India and Boston, asking how algorithms could help solve problems in maternal healthcare, public health and wildlife conservation. Today, I am an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. I teach algorithms to more than 200 undergraduate students, mentor young researchers, supervise PhD students, and am building my own research group. It is interesting to be on this side now.
I began as a student trying to understand what research even was. Then I spent years worrying about whether I had found a sufficiently ‘big’ question. Today, part of my job is helping other students find their own questions. When I look back, there wasn’t one dramatic moment when I decided what my life would become. One decision simply led to another.
To summarise, I would advise aspiring researchers not to spend all their time searching for the one problem that will define them. You need to learn how to ask good and relevant questions. Find people who make you a better researcher without making you miserable. Build a life outside your work. And give yourself permission not to know exactly where all of it is leading. I certainly didn’t. My journey happened one question at a time.”

-Arpita Biswas, PhD in Computer Science, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Interviewed and written by Aniruddha Mukherjee

20/09/2026

“For twelve years, I worked alongside Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on India’s SLV-3 programme. This was long before India became the space power we know today. I had joined the Space Science and Technology Centre, which would later become part of ISRO, as an engineer trainee in 1970. We were building capabilities that India was still learning to build for itself.
I was a chemical engineer by profession, and was fortunate enough to spend some of the most formative years of my career working on India’s early launch vehicle programme. What I did not know then was that more than two decades after beginning my career, I would become a student again.
In 1989, while still working at ISRO, I registered for a PhD at IIT Kharagpur. I wasn’t pursuing it because I needed a ‘Dr.’ before my name. By then, I had already spent years working on rockets. I considered doing a PhD in order to solve a practical problem at work.
Solid rocket propellants based on HTPB need to remain processable long enough to be mixed, handled and cast properly. My research focused on understanding their rheology and finding ways to extend this working time and improve their processing. Doing a PhD while working at ISRO, however, meant that research itself was only part of the challenge. I was externally registered at IIT Kharagpur while based in Trivandrum. When I needed to be at the institute, I had to travel by train. The journey could take nearly three days. I would attend my reviews, discuss my work and then make the same journey back. There were no video calls or shared online documents. Progress sometimes quite literally had to travel across the country with you.
I was also much older than most students around me. But I never wanted to remain an outsider who simply arrived for his PhD work and left. I participated in campus activities, spent time with younger researchers and became part of student life. That community helped me through the difficult stretches of a PhD. One of those stretches came when I thought my thesis was almost ready. Professor B.R. Gupta reviewed it and pointed out several corrections that still had to be made. Suddenly, we were rewriting, correcting and getting pages typed again against an approaching submission. At that moment, it felt stressful. Looking back, I value it. It is better for someone to find the weaknesses in your work while you still have the opportunity to strengthen it. Additionally, my wife and children were extremely supportive during those five years which made my PhD journey smoother and more focused.
I completed my PhD in 1993. But the part of this story that matters most to me came afterwards. My research did not end with my thesis. We developed and patented two processes: multiple casting for igniters and solar-heated water curing for solid propellants. Both went beyond publications and patents to find application in rocket manufacturing at ISRO and DRDO. That, to me, is the purpose of research.
A thesis can sit on a shelf. A paper can be published and cited. But when something you developed continues to solve a real problem years later, the work has travelled far beyond your degree. Perhaps that is why I would never advise someone to pursue a PhD simply for the qualification. Do it because there is a problem you genuinely want to understand. Choose your supervisor carefully. Read extensively before rushing into experiments. Understand what has already been done and where the real unanswered question lies. Researchers today have tools we could not have imagined. Use them, but use them judiciously. Technology can make research faster; it cannot replace understanding, focus or scientific credibility.
When I look back, the thing that gives me the greatest satisfaction is knowing that something we once worked on as a research problem eventually became something that was actually used to build rockets. For a scientist, I can’t think of something more fulfilling than that.”

-Muthiah Ramanathan, PhD in Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Interviewed by Aniruddha Mukherjee and written by Payel Das

16/09/2026

“My PhD did not follow the path I had expected. The environment in the laboratory I initially joined became difficult, and eventually I had to make the decision to switch laboratories. In 2019, I joined Prof. Saptarshi Mukherjee’s group and, in many ways, had to find my footing again.
My research explored how drugs or external molecules interact with proteins. I was particularly interested in whether small molecules affect well-structured globular proteins differently from intrinsically disordered proteins. Using spectroscopy and other biophysical approaches, I tried to understand how those interactions alter protein conformation and function.
Then COVID interrupted research everywhere. Experiments stopped, timelines changed, and the uncertainty that already comes with a PhD became even greater. Later, around the time of my thesis defence, I also lost another mentor, Prof. Kankan Bhattacharyya, who was a father figure in my career.
I eventually defended my thesis in November 2022. Along the way, receiving the Professor Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Young Scientist Award from the Indian Chemical Society was a moment of reassurance that the work I had spent years building mattered. But I also learnt that surviving a PhD cannot be only about what happens inside the laboratory.
For me, dance (Kathak) is my passion and so are family, friends and a social life outside research. Having something that had nothing to do with experiments or publications helped me remain myself when research became overwhelming. That is why I think we need to speak more openly about research environments. A supervisor-student relationship can shape several years of someone’s life. Students need mentors who are willing to listen, communicate and recognise that unrealistic workloads do not necessarily create better scientists. I was fortunate that my PhD supervisor, Prof. Saptarshi Mukherjee, stood beside me in all difficult situations. I feel PhD students also need higher fellowships and, at the very least, stipends that arrive on time. Researchers should not have to repeatedly worry about when they will be paid while trying to do good science.
And the uncertainty does not necessarily disappear after the PhD. Age restrictions and different forms of social discrimination can continue to influence who gets opportunities in academia. If I could tell younger researchers one thing, it would be not to measure your PhD only by the number of papers you publish. Understand and love your science. If you are part of a collaborative project, don’t restrict yourself to knowing only the experiment assigned to you. Understand what everyone is doing and why it is important.
My PhD involved changing laboratories, losing research time to a pandemic, and navigating experiences I had never anticipated when I joined. But perhaps one of its most important lessons was that a PhD is not about becoming very good at producing data, it is about learning to understand the science behind it and finding an environment where you are actually allowed to grow into that scientist.”

-Ushasi Pramanik, PhD in Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal

Interviewed by Aniruddha Mukherjee and written by Payel Das

13/09/2026

“I never wanted to do a PhD. My family struggled financially, and growing up, education had a very practical purpose for me: I needed it to escape poverty. I was good at studies, but I wouldn’t say I had some great passion for science. Even after completing my Master’s in chemistry, I was very clear that I did not want a PhD.
I looked for government jobs. I worked in a news editorial. I discovered that I could survive outside science. But the job was unstable, and around the same time, I received the INSPIRE Fellowship. Suddenly, a PhD seemed like a possibility worth considering. So I joined a CSIR-NIIST in Kerala.
Initially, I wasn’t particularly good at research. During one interview, a faculty member told me something that changed the way I approached my PhD: “Don’t become the hand of your supervisor. Use your brain. Read. Understand why you are doing something before you do it.” I started thinking differently. Later, when my co-supervisor left, I began working directly with my main supervisor, who gave me something incredibly valuable: freedom; freedom to ask questions, explore ideas and sometimes be wrong.
My PhD focused on developing fluorescent molecules for imaging cells. We designed small molecules that could stain entire cells or specific organelles and help us understand changes such as pH inside them. Then one day, something unexpected happened. A molecule behaved in a way we hadn’t designed it to. That accident eventually led us to a remarkably versatile pH-sensing molecule capable of distinguishing pH across different cellular organelles with very high precision.
There is some irony in that. We enter PhDs imagining we will carefully design discoveries. Sometimes the most interesting science happens because something refuses to behave according to the design. My PhD took about four and a half years, including nearly two years affected by COVID. I don’t want to pretend that my experience was extraordinarily difficult just because difficult PhD stories sound more impressive. There were a few hard moments though. A former co-PI scooped one of my papers. It hurt, but I was hopeful about creating something better. The hardest period had very little to do with research.
My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer during my PhD. Suddenly, experiments and papers became very small things. What I remember most from that period is my supervisor’s response. He cared more about whether I was okay than whether I was producing data. During COVID, I couldn’t return home for seven months while my mother was immunocompromised. That experience taught me what a good research environment actually means. It isn’t only about publications, equipment or the name of the institute. It is about whether the people around you remember that you are a human being before you are a researcher.
I also learnt very deliberately to leave the laboratory in the laboratory. When experiments went badly, I went out with my camera. I did photography. I went to the beach in Kerala. I had a life that had nothing to do with fluorescent molecules. I think that protected me.
Academia has a strange tendency to glorify suffering. We hear stories of people sacrificing ten or fifteen years, their health, relationships and happiness, and somehow turn that suffering into evidence that they deserved their degree. I don’t believe in that. A PhD is part of your life. It is not your life. You do not need to suffer to prove that you belong in science. You don’t even need to be consumed by research every waking hour to be good at it. If an environment is destroying you, leaving does not mean you weren’t capable of succeeding.
I knew throughout my PhD that if the suffering became greater than what the degree was worth, I could quit. I had worked outside academia before. I knew I could build another life. Perhaps knowing that I could leave made it easier for me to stay.
Today, one of the skills I value most from my PhD and postdoctoral work isn’t something I learnt from a chemistry textbook. It is learning how to speak to biologists, understand what they actually need and then use chemistry to build tools that answer those questions.
I want to bring more of that thinking back to India- building custom chemical-biology tools and helping bridge the gap between people who understand biology and people who understand the molecules. But there is another thing I would like younger researchers to understand. Don’t choose suffering because somebody told you that suffering is what serious scientists do. Choose a supervisor who will support you when your mother is ill. Choose a laboratory where you are allowed to think rather than simply become someone else’s hands. Choose a smaller institute if it gives you a healthier environment. Go outside. Take photographs. Go to the beach. Have people and interests that know nothing about your thesis. Don't take yourself too seriously. Most of us will not change the world because we planned to. If we are fortunate, we might stumble upon something useful while trying to understand a question properly. Sometimes, as I learnt from one unexpected fluorescent molecule, the best discoveries happen by accident. Your PhD shouldn’t cost you the rest of your life while you wait for one.”

-Sandip Chakraborty, PhD in Chemistry, National Institute For Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, Trivandrum

Interviewed by Debalina Acharyya and written by Payel Das

09/09/2026

“I grew up in a simple family in Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir where my father was a police officer. I did my schooling and Bachelor’s there, and for a while, I actually thought I might become an actor.
But I knew I needed to study further, and chemistry had always been my favourite subject. Research entered my life almost accidentally, but once I started, it felt right. My work focused on the effects of drugs and other chemicals on water, something we rarely think about. I worked on semiconductor materials that use photocatalysis to degrade these pollutants and make contaminated water safer. Today, in France, I continue working on an industry-linked project involving the degradation of a toxic chemical used in agriculture.
My PhD, however, was not an easy journey. There were sixteen students in our group, and I was one of only two who were neither employed nor paid. I was told that I wasn’t efficient enough to deserve payment. That stayed with me. Instead of telling my parents how difficult things were financially, I let them believe everything was fine. They continued supporting my education.
I worked hard. In my first year, I published ten research articles. PhD taught me science, but more importantly, it taught me patience. Research has a strange way of preparing you for life; you fail, wait, try something different and learn that results rarely arrive according to your timeline.
Moving to France showed me another way research could be done. Researchers had more space, funding and support. The atmosphere could be casual without compromising the science. In India, I had experienced enormous talent but also intense competition and limited resources. It made me realise how much potential we already have and how different things could be if researchers had the environment to match it.
Chemistry has never been my only world, however. I have always loved stories, cinema and creativity. During this journey, I wrote and published a science-fiction novel, Wamika. I practise cinematography. I even run a meme page. Sometimes people find it unusual that a chemist wants to do all these things. I don’t. Science teaches me to understand the world. Art gives me another way to talk about it.
Living in France also made me notice how differently artists can be treated. Here, creative work is often valued and celebrated. Back home, choosing to invest time or money in art can still be dismissed as impractical. Someday, I would love to find the right people- an investor, editor, composer and actors and turn one of my stories into a film. For now, I remain a researcher working on water, a writer imagining other worlds and someone who still loves looking through a camera.
If my research has taught me anything, it is that we need to understand the ecosystem before we can protect it. We cannot keep polluting water and assume someone else will eventually clean it. And if life has taught me anything, it is to remain grateful. There will be moments when you are doing exceptionally well and moments when nothing seems to work. You should be prepared to face both. Sometimes, you may have to face them alone.
I never planned this exact journey, from Poonch to chemistry, from an unpaid PhD to research in France, from semiconductor materials to writing science fiction. I entered research almost by accident. But somewhere along the way, I realised I never had to choose between being a scientist and being creative. I could be both.”

-Vishal Dutta, PhD in Chemistry, Shoolini University, Himachal Pradesh

Interviewed by Debalina Acharyya and written by Payel Das

06/09/2026

“I did not enter ecology because I had always dreamt of becoming a wildlife biologist. I had actually wanted to study medicine. When I did not clear the medical entrance examinations, I had to rethink what came next. Engineering never appealed to me, particularly because mathematics and I had stopped getting along somewhere in the later years of school. So I chose Environmental Sciences.
What initially felt like an alternative slowly became something I genuinely cared about. I was fortunate to have professors who took a personal interest in teaching us, and one mentor in particular introduced me properly to ecology and fieldwork. Later, during my Master’s at Pondicherry University, I became certain that I wanted to work in wildlife biology and ecology, particularly in natural systems, outside the predictability of a classroom or laboratory.
A PhD, however, was not an immediate decision. After clearing GATE, I first worked as a Junior Research Fellow for a year. I wanted to understand whether I actually liked research enough to commit several years of my life to it. I briefly considered the Indian Forest Service too, but administrative work didn’t appeal to me. So I chose research.
My PhD began with marmots in Ladakh. I was interested in their demography and was supposed to work with these animals at high altitudes. It sounded exciting on paper. In reality, field ecology has a way of reminding you that your research plan is sometimes only a suggestion. Permits to capture the animals became difficult. Logistics repeatedly failed. There was also a mismatch between the questions I was interested in and the direction my guide wanted to take; the demography that interested me versus a stronger focus on genomics and genetics. For almost two years, I struggled to make the project materialise the way I had imagined.
I seriously considered quitting. Two of my friends had already left their PhDs, so leaving no longer felt like an unimaginable thing. I remember reaching the point where I had to ask myself whether continuing with the same questions simply because they were my original questions made any sense. Just before my comprehensive examination, I changed them almost completely.
My guide eventually supported that decision, and my labmates became one of the biggest reasons I made it through that period. People talk a lot about choosing a supervisor before a PhD, but I think we underestimate how much the people sitting beside you every day matter. My labmates helped me practically and mentally when things were falling apart. My partner, who also came from a science background, understood the strange frustrations that come with research.
Then COVID happened. For a field ecologist, lockdown meant I could no longer go to my field. So I had to ask myself what I could do sitting in front of a computer. I started looking at squirrels. There was surprisingly little reliable occurrence information for many squirrel species in India and South Asia. These were understudied taxa from regions that were themselves underrepresented in global biodiversity datasets. I began collecting records from published literature. Then I started incorporating citizen-science observations and even information available through social media. What began as an alternative to fieldwork grew into a database containing more than 70,000 records across 30 species: the first dataset of its kind at that scale for squirrels in Asia.
My PhD eventually took six and a half years. My fellowship, however, didn’t last that long. For roughly the last year and a half, I had no fellowship support. I survived through savings, help from my family and freelance work. That part of doing a PhD is discussed far less than it should be. At some point, you are an adult who needs financial independence, and passion does not pay rent. After spending six years earning a doctorate, you may still enter the job market and be classified as a ‘fresher’ unless the position specifically requires your expertise.
By the time I defended my thesis, I thought I would feel euphoric. I didn’t. I was mostly exhausted. There was relief, certainly, but after six and a half years, I did not have the energy for the dramatic feeling of ‘I finally did it’. I had simply reached the end of something that had occupied a very large part of my life. I don’t regret my PhD though. It shaped me enormously. But that is different from saying everyone who loves ecology needs one.
Ecology itself is often misunderstood. Tell someone you work in environmental science and they may assume you study pollution. Tell them you are a field ecologist and sometimes the response is essentially, ‘So you trek and watch animals?’ Fieldwork can look idyllic from the outside. What people don’t see is how little control you have. An animal doesn’t appear because your sampling schedule says it should. Weather changes. Permissions don’t arrive. Equipment fails hundreds of kilometres away from your institute. One logistical problem can affect months of data.
We have started taking ecology and climate science more seriously only in recent times, but I sometimes wonder whether that attention came only when environmental damage began translating into economic damage. Unfortunately, when environmental protection conflicts with money, the environment still loses far too often. So when someone tells me they want to pursue a PhD in ecology, my first response isn’t generally an encouragement but asking them if they really need a PhD for what they want to do!
There are careers in GIS, agroforestry, restoration, NGOs and conservation projects where a Master’s degree combined with the right skills and experience may take you where you want to go. Explore those possibilities first. And if you still think you want a PhD, I strongly recommend working as a JRF before enrolling. Get paid to experience research. Learn how a laboratory or field group functions. Understand the academic system. See what your daily life will actually look like because committing five or six years of your life is not only an academic decision, it is also a financial and often a deeply personal decision.
I began my PhD thinking I would study marmots in Ladakh. I finished it having built a database of tens of thousands of squirrel records because permits failed, research questions changed and a pandemic made fieldwork impossible. Perhaps that is the most accurate thing I can say about research- the question you begin with may not be the question you answer. The important thing is learning when to hold on to the plan and when to let the plan change.”

-Swati Udayraj, PhD in Ecology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Tirupati

Interviewed by Debalina Acharyya and written by Payel Das

PhDs of India

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