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.

Demo by Dr. Nagabhushana
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 |