Category National Awards

Is Kanak Saha a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology?

Yes, Kanak Saha is a famous Indian astrophysicist and he did receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize.

Do you know what Kanak Saha and his team discovered? They found that a galaxy which is 9.3 billion light years away from the Earth was emitting ultra violet light! His team used AstroSat, India’s first multi-wavelength satellite to observe this galaxy. It took them two years to analyze the data and to verify it.

This is an important clue to the origins of the universe, its dark ages and how light originated.

Kanak Saha was born on 04 February 1977 in Cooch Behar, West Bengal. He graduated in Physics from the Scottish Church College in 1998. For Masters, he went to Banaras Hindu University and completed his Ph.D from the Indian Institute of Science in 2008.

He is now working as associate professor of astrophysics at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune. He studies the dynamics of galaxies using cluster computer simulation.

He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2021.

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What made Debdeep Mukhopadhyay’s contributions remarkable?

Debdeep Mukhopadhyay is a cryptographer and Computer Science professor at IIT, Kharagpur. He is interested in Hardware security, Cryptographic Engineering, Design Automation of Crypto- systems, and VLSI of Crypto- systems.

Mukhopadhyay was born on 31st October, 1977 in Howrah, a twin town of Kolkata. He was interested in computers from a young age and was inspired by his father, himself a computer professional. He was a student of IIT Kharagpur from his graduation till Ph.D. His Ph.D. thesis won the Techno-Inventor Award (for the best Ph.D.), from the Indian Semi- conductors Association in 2008.

He worked at IIT, Madras as Assistant Professor from 2007-8. Then he again joined his alma mater in 2008 and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. He has worked as visiting faculty at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and New York University Shanghai, China. He was also a visiting scientist at the CYSREN, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Debdeep won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize for his contribution to cryptographic engineering in 2021.

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What are Sunil Mukhi’s areas of research?

Dr. Sunil Mukhi is an Indian theoretical physicist who has greatly contributed to the string theory and the quantum field theory. We have already dealt with the string theory. The quantum field theory studies the behaviour of subatomic particles in different kinds of force fields.

Dr Mukhi took a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1981. Then he did postdoctoral studies at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy. He came back to India and joined the Theoretical Physics Group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai in 1993.

He joined as head of the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune in 2012. He rose to become the Dean after 7 years.

He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the Indian National Science Academy. He has received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award for Physical Sciences, 1999, and the J.C. Bose Fellowship, 2008. He was named a Fellow of TWAS, (The World Academy of Sciences) in October 2014.

He is also the editor of the Journal of High Energy Physics since its start.

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What makes Prof. C.N.R Rao a notable figure in the Indian scientific field?

Prof. C.N.R. Rao is a world-famous Indian scientist specialising in solid state and structural chemistry.

He did research in superconductivity, and his latest research is on the wonder material graphene and artificial photosynthesis.

Prof. Rao was a single child. His father was an Inspector of Schools, but surprisingly, he did not go to elementary school. He was coached at home by his mother. His parents saw to it that he was fluent in both English and his mother-tongue, Kannada.

Rao’s passion for chemistry started during his high school years and he chose Chemistry for his higher studies, and went to the Banaras Hindu University for his Master’s. Later, he got scholarship offers to do Ph.D. from four foreign universities: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Penn State, Columbia and Purdue. He went to Purdue and completed his Ph.D in 2 years and nine months in 1958. He was only 24!

84 universities have given him honorary doctorates. He has 54 books and around 1,774 research publications.

He is the founder president of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, and was the chairman of the science advisory council to the prime minister for many years. He is also Founding Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Now, have a look at some of the awards and honours received by this great man:

  • Marlow Medal
  • Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology
  • Hughes Medal
  • India Science Award
  • Dan David Prize
  • Royal Medal
  • Von Hippel Award
  • ENI award
  • Padma Shri
  • Padma Vibhushan

On 16 November 2013, the Government of India selected him for Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India. Thus he became the third scientist after C.V. Raman and APJ. Abdul Kalam to receive the Bharat Ratna.

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What are the contributions of Dr. Amit Singh, in the field of microbiology?

Amit Singh is a famous Indian microbiologist. An associate professor at the department of microbiology and cell biology of the Indian Institute of Science, he studied how Mycobacterium causes tuberculosis and is well known for this.

Amit Singh was born on 18 March 1976. After graduating in science from the University of Delhi, he joined IIT, Roorkee for his Master’s degree in biotechnology. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Delhi and went to the U.S for post-doctoral studies.

He came back to India in 2010 and joined the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology as a Wellcome Trust-DBT intermediate fellow. After four years, he joined the IISc, Bangalore where he is working now.

He is the head of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research. Research is done there on tuberculosis, AIDS and other chronic or long-lasting not infections.

He has received many prestigious awards. You can specially note these two:

  • National Bioscience Award for Career Development – 2017-18
  • CSIR- Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award-2021 (for bio-scientific research).

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Which are the major awards received by Dr. Kalam?

Dr. Kalam was the recipient of numerous national and international awards. Their list is really lengthy. Let us briefly look at how his own mother country venerated him.

He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1981 and Padma Vibhushan in 1990. He also received India’s highest honour Bharat Ratna for his research and defence related work, and Outlook magazine ranked him as Second Greatest Indian in 2012.

Coming to his own state, Tamil Nadu, his death anniversary is observed as Youth Renaissance Day there. Further, the Abdul Kalam Award is given every year on the occasion of Independence Day from 2015 onwards. This carries a certificate, a gold medal and a whopping fifty thousand rupees.

On his 84th birth anniversary, October 15, 2015, a postage stamp in Dr. Kalam’s memory was released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at DRDO Bhawan in New Delhi.

After Dr. Kalam’s death, several educational and scientific institutions were renamed after him.

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