The Academy was delighted to welcome a four-member delegation from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Govt of India for a review meeting on 14 June 2019. The delegates were Dr. Meenakshi Munshi, Dr. Suraksha S. Diwan, Dr. Sabhyata Bhatia and Dr. Asif Mohammed.

The day commenced with introductions and setting-of-context by the Academy’s CEO Prof. Sastry and Dr. Munshi. Prof. Sastry presented an overview of the DBT-supported PhD program in the Academy. This was followed by a series of presentations by the students and supervisors being supported by the DBT. The student-and-supervisor-teams spoke about their research work, the progress and the direction in which they aim to proceed.

In the second half of the day, the Academy’s COO Dr. Nagabhushana showed the delegates around the Academy building, including a visit to the state-of-the-art laboratories housed within. They also had interactions with some of the start-up companies and Industry partners based in the Academy.

Academy-DBT partnership: an overview

In order to strengthen links with the government in the area of biotechnology, basic biology and devices, the Academy had submitted a proposal to the Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India in May 2016 to support joint PhD students. After reviewing the proposal, the DBT sanctioned an amount towards support of costs for 65 PhDs in the dual-badged joint PhD program of the IITB-Monash Research Academy over a period of 10 years beginning January 2017. A list of the Academy’s students supported by the DBT as of June 2019 is appended below in Table 1.

Table 1: IITB-Monash Research Academy Students supported by the Department of Biotechnology

No	Student Name	IITB Department	Research Topic	Supervisors
1	Manasi Prashant Kane	MEMS	Wearable Electrophysiological Sensors for Health Monitoring	Prof. Dipti Gupta, Prof. Wenlong Cheng
2	Prasanna Ravindran Kamal Prakash Nair	Bio	Exploring the adhesive property of sickle cell of improved diagnosis	Prof. Debjani Paul, Prof. Tuncay Alan
3	Sourabh Mehta	Bio	Smart Nanoparticles for Detection of Vulnerable Atherosclerotic Plaques and their Therapeutic Stabilisation	Prof. Rinti Banerjee, Prof. Karlheinz Peter, Prof. Alex Bobik
4	Subramoni Hariharan	CTARA	High Quality Protein Extraction From Plant Based Sources	Prof. Amit Arora, Prof. Antonio Patti
5	Vibha Kumari	Bio	Identification of human host factors required for human influenza virus assembly and budding	Prof. Kiran Kondabagil, Prof. Rommel Mathias, Prof. Sunil K Lal
6	Aman Pandey	Chemistry	Design, Synthesis and Application of biocatalysts for Continuous Flow Synthesis	Prof. Anil Kumar, Prof. Neil Cameron
7	Balu Raveendran	MEMS	Nanomaterials enabled Palpation device for cancer detection	Prof. Dipti Gupta, Prof. Sunita Chauhan, Prof. Gita Pendharkar
8	Ami Lalit Mehta	Bio	Blood brain barrier (BBB) on chip	Prof. Prasanna Gandhi, Prof. Nicolas Voelcker
9	Shachi Saluja	Chemical	Ophthalmic drug delivery with porous silicon	Prof. Jayesh Bellare, Prof. Nicolas Voelcker
10	Kusumika Sinha Roy	CTARA	Bioactives and Natural Dyes From Food and Agricultural Waste Sources	Prof. Amit Arora, Prof. Antonio Patti, Prof. Kellie Tuck
11	Poornima V B	CTARA	Cellulose nanofibers recovery from fruits waste	Prof. Amit Arora, Prof. Warren Batchelor
12	Sujata Walunj	Bio	The novel nuclear transport molecule importing from Plasmodium falciparum; potential drug target	Prof. Swati Patankar, Prof. David A. Jans
13	Parvathy Nair	Electrical	Novel health monitoring system with analysis for patients with mental disorders	Prof. Maryam Shojaei Baghini, Prof. Faezeh Marzbanrad, Prof. Gita Pendharkar
14	Anjana P Menon	Chemistry	Role of bacterial sugar-based lipids in mediating membrane-induced cell death.	Prof. Shobhna Kapoor, Prof. Mibel Aguilar
15	Mallikarjuna Korrapati	MEMS	Tactile sensor array for biomedical applications	Prof. Dipti Gupta,Prof. Sunita Chauhan, Prof. Gita Pendharkar
16	Monica Upadhyay	BIO	Finding cues for metabolism inside giant virus particles – Are giant viruses ‘alive’?	Prof. Kiran Kondabagil, Prof. Gregory Moseley
17	Arkasubhro Chatterjee	CTARA	Pectin Based films/gels for antibiotic/antifungal applications	Prof. Amit Arora,Prof. Antonio Patti, Prof. Phil Andrews
18	Rafath Abdul Nassar	Chemical	Modeling and simulations of propulsion and swimming in microorganisms	Prof. Sameer Jadhav, Prof. Prabhakar Ranganathan
19	Anup kumar Prasad	MEMS	Amyloid formation in frog peptides: Exploring peptide-lipid interactions	Prof. Ajay Singh Panwar, Prof. Lisandra Martin
20	Kajal Sharma	Chemical	Microfluidic route to generation of core-shell fibers for drug delivery	Prof. Venkat Gundabala, Prof. Tuncay Alan
21	Silpa Mariya	Chemical Engineering	Modelling the subdiffusive motion of bacteriophages within mucus	Prof.P Sunthar,Prof. Jeremy J.Barr and Prof.Ravi Prakash Jagadeeshan
22	Aswin Paul	Electrical Engineering	The Arrow of Sophistication in Biological Self-Organization	Dr Manoj Gopalakrishnan (IIT Bombay) and Dr Adeel Razi (Monash University