18 Indian Minds Who Are Doing Cutting Edge Work
1. Chaitan Khosla
He developed a treatment for celiac sprue, a disease that affects many in India. His work in biodiesel is globally significant too.
Profile: He is chair, chemical engineering; Wells H. Rauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor in the School of Engineering; Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Biochemistry at Stanford University.
His Main Area of Work: His research lies at the intersection of chemistry and medicine. He has been working with genetically modified soil bacteria to develop new medicines (called polyketides) to treat cancer, infections, and other diseases.
In 1995, he co-founded biotechnology company Kosan Biosciences, which was acquired by drug maker Bristol Myers Squibb in 2008. Later, he founded Alvine Pharmaceuticals, which is developing an oral enzyme drug discovered in his laboratory for the treatment of celiac sprue—an autoimmune disorder, triggered by gluten in cereals, that affects the small intestines.
Yet another company he’s founded, Flamentera AG, is focussed on developing novel biomarkers for gastrointestinal diseases.
In September 2011, he and his research team found that high volumes of biodiesel can be produced from bacteria where E. coli can be used as a catalyst. Khosla and his team are currently trying to find ways to enhance its cellular controls to push this further.
How His Research Can Benefit India: A decade ago, one in 1,000 of the population were affected by celiac sprue but the occurrence has increased. Today, one in 310 people in India are affected by the disease and one in 120-300 of the population in Europe and North America.
His work in biodiesel is globally significant too. If successful, his work could help propel biodiesel to a commercial market from the niche space it occupies now.
What They Say About Him: “Khosla can tackle huge challenges and makes strong efforts to move forward. With celiac disease, there was an unmet medical need with no treatment except a lifelong gluten free diet at the time he stepped in. He has showed a strong commitment to do something about this,” says Ludvig M. Sollid, director, Center for Immune Regulation, Research Council of Norway.
(Nilofer D’Souza)
2. Krishna Palem
He has deviced a new microchip that uses less energy; also, his solar-powered notepad, iSlate, is being tested in India
Profile: He is head of the Rice-NTU Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAI), Singapore.
His Main Area of Work: His research is focussed on embedded computing, including low-energy computing and nanoelectronics. He’s pioneered a “pruned” microchip technology. An “inexact hardware” that drastically reduces power demands of microprocessors by allowing them to make mistakes, it is the harbinger of the next-generation power-stingy processors. Called probabilistic pruning, this technology makes the integrated circuits perform twice as fast, use half as much energy, and occupy half the space of the traditional circuits. This, says Krishna, is done by cleverly managing the “probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors”.
While doing this Palem has showed that the energy consumed by a computation could be traded for its accuracy. For applications such as digital image and video processing or cryptography, such integrated circuits can be designed to produce results to only the required accuracy, and therefore, the power needed for the computation can be drastically reduced.
How His Research Can Benefit India: Along with his team, he is creating a complete prototype chip for a specific application, a hearing aid to begin with. He has developed a solar powered iSlate, an electronic notepad, which is currently being tested in schools in Mohd. Hussainpalli village in Andhra Pradesh. In its 125th anniversary, IEEE recognised his PCMOS technology and iSlate as one of the seven “world changing technologies”.
What They Say About Him: “An unwavering theme of his vision has been to address the principal challenges to sustaining the performance and economic benefits of Moore’s Law. With probabilistic CMOS technology, he has perhaps shown the most profoundly original approach to tackling the barriers of power consumption and noise immunity in the continuation of the decades-long exponential improvement in the area and speed of the integrated circuits, known as the Moore’s Law,” says Moshe Y. Vardi, director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University.
(Seema Singh)
3. Rakesh Agrawal
He is working on efficient and cheap energy production from renewable sources such as solar and biomass.
Profile: He is Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University.
His Main Area of Work: Imagine being able to print out a solar panel on a flexible substrate; to be able to spray-on a low-cost nanocrystal coating and assemble a thin film solar plant wherever power is needed. If Agrawal has his way, this dream may well be reality one day. He is working on two types of nanocrystals: Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), and Copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS). His team has managed to reach 12.5 percent efficiency with CIGS, which is pretty close to what you get with silicon solar cells. CZTS has only 8.4 percent efficiency, but utilises earth-abundant materials which will decrease the cost as efficiency increases.
He is also looking for an efficient way to convert biomass to liquid fuel (like diesel) that can be used in transportation (which uses up about half the fossil fuel produced worldwide).
His Approach: Thin-film technologies have made photovoltaic materials more competitive, but costs need to reduce further. Agrawal’s aims to bring it below 50 cents/peak watt. US solar panel maker First Solar is currently the lowest cost producer of thin films at 74 cents/peak watt. Agrawal’s approach is to utilise nanomaterials that can be suspended in appropriate solvents and then deposited utilising high throughput capabilities. He hopes to commercialise the systems when he achieves efficiencies of about 15 percent.
How His Research Can Benefit India: India is grappling with huge energy shortages. If solar cells become cheaper and more easily available, it can change the dynamics of power production and availability in the country.
What Others Say About Him: “Agrawal has been developing what are called ‘ink based’ precursors to make the thin film solar cells of either CIGS or CZTS. The highest efficiencies reported for CZTSSe (Copper Zinc Tin Sulfo-selenide) has been about 10 percent. There appears, at this point, no fundamental reason why it should not be possible to exceed 15 percent efficiencies,” says Supratik Guha, director, Physical Sciences Department, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
(Cuckoo Paul)
4. Mriganka Sur Reveals the Mysteries of The Brain
5. Jayant Baliga's Invention Is A Power Saver
6. Harry Bhadeshia's steel connects UK, France
Single Page View
In a thought provoking article, 'Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China'(TechCrunch,Oct 7,2009) Vivek Wadhwa brought out many pertinent points on Reverse Brain Drain to India and China:
Why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth? Or to leave other promising locales such as New York City, Boston and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina?
My team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley polled 1203 returnees to India and China during the second half of 2008 to find answers to exactly this question. What we found should concern even the most boisterous Silicon Valley boosters.
We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population's educational top tier - precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy's innovation and growth. And it isn't just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That's right 'it's not just about green cards.
What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a 'better quality of life' than what they had in the U.S. (There was also some reverse culture shock complaints about congestion in India, say, and pollution in China.) When it came to social factors, 67% of the Chinese and 80% of the Indians cited better 'family values' at home. Ability to care for aging parents was also cited, and this may be a hidden visa factor: it's much harder to bring parents and other family members over to the U.S. than in the past. For the vast majority of returnees, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element.
A return ticket home also put their career on steroids. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the U.S. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the U.S. to 36% in China.
(Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and executive in residence/adjunct professor at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University).
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
