Biological Sciences & Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur

The three-year tenure of Prof. R. Sankararamakrishnan as Head of BSBE Department has ended on 31/Aug/2022. Prof. Amitabha Bandyopadhyay has taken over as the new Head of BSBE Department on 1/Sep/2022 for a duration of three years. Prof. R. Sankararamakrishnan handed over the charge and welcomed the new Head of BSBE department. BSBE thanks the outgoing Head Prof. Sankar and wishes the new Head Prof. Amitabha !!

Dr. Mohit Kumar Jolly, an alumnus of BSBE Department, has been selected for the Young Alumnus Award (YAA) by IIT-Kanpur for the year 2022. Young Alumnus Award has been instituted to recognize those Alumni who are less than 40 years of age and achieve exemplary recognition and distinguish themselves during the early stages of career in their chosen domain bringing glory to their alma mater.

Dr. Jolly did his B.Tech (2006-2010) and M.Tech (2010-2012) in BSBE. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. His broad research area is cancer systems biology.

Congratulations to Dr. Jolly from all of us !! BSBE is proud of our alumni achievements and we wish Dr. Jolly many more such laurels in the future.

Ms. Pon Ezhil Buvani, a Ph.D. student in BSBE Department defended her Ph.D. thesis last week (17th Aug 2022). Her supervisor is Prof. K. Subramaniam (now in IIT-Madras). Title of Ms. Buvani's thesis is "gvd-1, a C. elegans gene, is essential for postembryonic cell division in diverse cell lineages". Prof. Varsha Singh of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was her external examiner. Prof. Amitabha Bandyopadhyay coordinated the Ph.D. defense exam. Ms. Buvani made an excellent presentation of her thesis work and answered all the examiners' questions.

Congratulations to the freshly minted Ph.D., Dr. Pon Ezhil Buvani and her supervisor Prof. K. Subramaniam !!

The correspondence written by Dr. Ashwani Kumar Thakur of BSBE with Dr. Arunkumar Pande of Lucknow Endocrine Diabetes and Thyroid clinic regarding insulin storage has appeared in "The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology".

Perceptions of alternative methods of insulin storage: an ethical dilemma Efficient insulin storage and prevention of its degradation remains one of the sought-after goals for endocrinologists, molecular biologists, and protein scientists. We read with interest the In-Focus piece by Talha Burki on insulin thermostability in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.1 Considerin...

The 55th Convocation of IIT-Kanpur was held last week. BSBE Department congratulates the award winners and all the Graduating Students. Wishing them all every success !!

There are recent advances in inferring cellular dynamics using single cell RNA-seq data. Accurately reconstructing the cell-state manifold and cell-fate plasticity for complex topologies using existing trajectory inference (TI) methods have faced difficulties. Dr. Hamim Zafar and his group have developed MARGARET (https://github.com/Zafar-Lab/Margaret) for inferring single-cell trajectory and fate mapping for diverse dynamic cellular processes. MARGARET outperformed state-of-the-art methods on a diverse benchmark consisting of synthetic and real datasets.

This study has just appeared in Nucleic Acids Research.
This paper can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac412

Inference of cell state transitions and cell fate plasticity from single-cell with MARGARET Abstract. Despite recent advances in inferring cellular dynamics using single-cell RNA-seq data, existing trajectory inference (TI) methods face difficulty in a

Mr. Arka Ghosh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, defended his thesis today. He worked under the supervision of Dr. Nitin Gupta. The title of his thesis is "TreadWill, an automated online tool for helping individuals with depressive symptoms". The external examiner was Prof. Mamta Sood of Department of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Arka made an excellent presentation explaining the software tool he has developed that will provide treatment digitally for people with mental health problems. The committee members appreciated the efforts in developing such a digital platform and provided many useful suggestions.

Congratulations to the freshly minted Dr. Arka Ghosh and his supervisor Dr. Nitin Gupta !!

BSBE Department is happy that Prof. Dhirendra Katti has taken over as the Dean of International Relations (DoIR) at IIT-Kanpur. Congratulations to Prof. Katti !! We are confident that Prof. Katti will be instrumental in bringing new academic programmes and research projects in association with reputed international institutes/universities. We are sure that Prof. Katti will take the DoIR activities to new heights.

BSBE Department wishes Prof. Katti all the success as DoIR !!

C.N.R. Rao Faculty award recognizes and honors a faculty member who through his/her work at IIT-Kanpur, has achieved excellence in research. The publication for which Dr. Nitin Gupta was selected for the C.N.R. Rao Faculty Award for the year 2020 can be accessed at:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14836-6

BSBE Department gave farewell to the graduating UG, PG and dual-degree students yesterday. This is the first in-person farewell function after two years. The students shared their fond memories about the department. The nearly two years lockdown did not dampen their spirits. BSBE faculty members wished the graduating students a great success. It was a memorable evening both for the faculty and students.

BSBE Department wish all the graduating students Good Luck and a great journey ahead !!