The research work of gold medal winners at the convocation of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) expands across various fields like aerospace engineering, medical imaging, neuroscience, physics, applied physics, and many more.
A conversation with some of these awardees gives a peek into the work they are doing at the institute, which has applications in the field of health, technology, and even studies that are similar to the work Elon Musk is doing.
When Shubhankar Saha came to the city in 2018 from West Bengal to join IISc, he was scared and nervous about the life that awaited him. Come 2022, he was conferred a gold medal for his work in the Department of Biological Sciences. He has enrolled into an integrated PhD programme. “This certification is for my master’s attached to my PhD degree. I have now joined the Centre for Neuroscience and am in the second year of PhD, which is where I am doing really interesting work in our monkey lab,” he said.
“As a doctoral student, I am working on understanding how our brain understands physical reasoning in the world. We are studying neurophysical recordings (which are obtained directly from their brain) from the behaviour of monkeys. We assess the visual behaviour (eye movements) of the monkeys to decode their cognitive abilities. This is somewhat similar to how Elon Musk tried to study monkeys’ behaviours with his electrode project,” Mr. Saha explained. He added that he is also doing human behavioural and functional MRI studies.
Navchethan Awasthi, who won the medal under the PhD programme category, developed a network model called Mini – COVIDNet while working in medical imaging. Along with other researchers, he developed a lightweight mobile friendly, efficient deep learning model which could detect COVID-19 based on ultrasound images of lungs. “The lightweight model can further be developed as a mobile application. Artificial intelligence (AI) models can be used for classification of COVID-19 and non COVID-19 patients,” he said. Post completion of his PhD, he is now working as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam.
Another engineering research medal-winning student developed a numerical model for combustion in aircraft during his master degree in the aerospace engineering department. Continuing his PhD in the same lab, he is now working on extending the model to study the soot formation in aircraft and its removal. “Soot is an important concern as it has an impact on climate change”, said Anindya Datta.
