“To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.”
- Louis Pasteur
Hello everyone, thanks for joining us on this journey as we discover the ecosystem around infectious disease research, practice and policy in India. In this episode of IDRF Speaks, we are talking to Prof. Rahul Roy, from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Rahul has a Btech in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, and a PhD in Biophysics and Computational Biology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and carried out his postdoctoral work at Harvard Univeristy. His laboratory at IISc uses microscopy and genomics sequencing to study viruses. He has been the recepient of the the Wellcome-DBT - India Alliance Intermediate Career Fellowship and and the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award, in India. For the last 5-6 years, we have been collaborating to understand how dengue viruses are mutating and evolving in the country. In this conversation we talk about a range of things - starting with observing viruses at the nanometer scale, diagnostic testing and assays to look at exposure to SARS-CoV-2, academia teaching and academia research We also cover some ideas around who should do a PhD? The importance of thinking creatively and the challenges along the way. Rahul is an inspiring and ethusiatic scientist and I really enjoyed this conversation and all its segways. I hope you enjoy it too.
#Flaviviruses #dengueInIndia #dengue #PhD #teachingInIndia #creativity
The dengue work we are talking about in the podcast was recently published Evolutionary dynamics of dengue virus in India. PLoS Pathog 19(4): e1010862. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1010862
The recording was done @kreu the new makerspace, which right on the main road wtith myriad traffic flows. It took me a while to clean this up and present it to you. I hope you will bear with the random noise and enjoy the conversation.
P.S. Podcast break - expect postcards
Hi everyone,
I will be taking a break from the IDRF Speaks podcast between mid-May-July 2023. In the interim, I plan to revive the community around the COVID Study Circle(something we experimented with during the pandemic) and continue to send you some updates on what’s circulating and what that means etc (basically infectious diseases in the Indian context). The hope is that this will help you stay ahead of the curve of work around infectious diseases in India - and maybe even ahead of the bugs themselves. Hope to have an exciting set of episodes for you around the animal-human interface diseases (zoonoses) in August 2023. So do stay tuned and send me your thoughts/comments/suggestions!
Episode 09- Looking closely at viruses