Malayali scientist among 12 CSIR award winners

New Delhi: The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on Monday announced the names of the 12 scientists who will be awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2022.

A Malayali, Akkattu T Biju of the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru, is among the list of winners. He won the prize for his contribution to the field of chemical sciences.

He has been an associate professor at the Department of Organic Chemistry in the institute since June 2017. Prior to that, he was a senior scientist with the CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune for six years.

He has won several awards for his contributions to the field of chemical science. In 2019, he won the Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry and a Bronze Medal from the Chemical Research Society of India.

Immunologist Dipyaman Ganguli of CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata; microbiologist Ashwani Kumar from CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh; biologist Maddika Subba Reddy from the Hyderabad-based Centre for DNA Fingerprinting Diagnostics; and Debabrata Maiti of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay are also among the awardees.

The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize is given every year to scientists under the age of 45 years and carries a purse of Rs 5 lakh and a citation.

The announcement of the awards came amid a row over the government's plans to prune the National Science Awards.

While Ganguli has been awarded in the field of medical sciences, Kumar and Reddy have received the Prize for their contribution to biological sciences.

Biju and Maiti have been awarded for their contribution to the field of chemical sciences.

In the Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences category, Vimal Mishra from Indian Institute of Technology-Gandhinagar has been named for the Prize.

In the Engineering Sciences category, Dipti Ranjan Sahoo of the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi; and Rajnish Kumar of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras have received the Prize.

In the field of Mathematical Sciences, Apoorva Khare of the Indian Institute of Science-Bengaluru and Neeraj Kayal from the Microsoft Research Lab India, Bengaluru have been selected for the Prize. In the category of Physical Sciences, Anindya Das of the Indian Institute of Science-Bengaluru and Basudeb Dasgupta of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai have been selected for the Prize.

The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, instituted in memory of the first Director General of the CSIR, are usually announced on the foundation day of the institution on September 26.

The winners of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2021 included Kanak Saha, Kanishka Biswas, Amit Singh, Arun Kumar Shukla, T Govindaraju, Binoy Kumar Saikia, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Anish Ghosh, Saket Saurabh, Jeemon Panniyammakal and Rohit Srivastava.

(With PTI inputs)