Host Institution India: Yale School of Medicine

Basavaprabhu L. Patil

Dr. Basavaprabhu L. Patil is a Principal Scientist (Plant Biotechnology) at ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR), Bengaluru. He did Bachelor’s of Science and Master’s of Science in Agriculture from UAS-Dharwad and Ph.D. (2001-2005) from University of Delhi. During Ph.D. he received a DAAD scholarship to work at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He did his postdoctoral research (2006-2010) in Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, USA and contributed to the development of Virus Resistant Cassava for Africa. Briefly he worked as Scientist-D, in the DBT’s National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, Mohali and then he relocated to University of Basel, Switzerland. In 2012, he joined as a Senior Scientist in ICAR-National Institute for Plant Biotechnology, New Delhi. In 2018, he relocated to ICAR-IIHR, Bengaluru and continues to work in the area of Plant Virology. During his stint in ICAR, he has been PI for multiple projects funded by DBT, BIRAC, BCIL and ICAR. He has published extensively and is a recognized editor for International Journals, and reviewer for Grant Applications. He has served as an external expert to assess the scientists from CSIR and ICAR. He was honored with the IVS Fellow Award by the Indian Virological Society in 2014 and received EU’s Erasmus Mundus scholarship in 2016. Recently, he was conferred with Prof. B.M. Johri memorial Award, by the Society for Plant Research (India).

During his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Patil will develop and validate novel Genome Editing Tools for Virus Diagnostics, Functional Genomics and Virus Control.

Ranjith Padinhateeri

Dr. Ranjith Padinhateeri is a professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). Dr. Padinhateeri’s lab focuses on theoretical studies to understand various biological phenomena using a variety of tools from physics, including statistical mechanics, polymer physics, and soft-matter theory. His specific areas of interest include nucleosome dynamics, chromatin assembly, DNA mechanics, and the self-assembly of proteins.

Dr. Padinhateeri completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Institute Curie, Paris. He gained expertise in applying physics principles to understand biological systems. Dr. Padinhateeri joined the IIT Bombay faculty in 2009. He and his team developed computational models to investigate the kinetics of nucleosomes and the polymer organization of chromatin. Dr. Padinhateeri has received several awards, including the National Bioscience Award from the Department of Biotechnology India.

Dr. Padinhateeri’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a model to understand chromatin organization —the organization of the genetic material— in space and time inside a cell nucleus, accounting for nucleosome dynamics. The predictions from computational studies of the model could help us to design gene regions that can have specific chromatin states. As a part of the fellowship, Dr. Padinhateeri also plans to teach a course on modeling biological processes covering stochastic processes, Monte Carlo simulations, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Sakshi Shukla

Ms. Sakshi Shukla is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), Mumbai. The aim of her Ph.D. thesis is to identify a biomarker to predict Levodopa Induced Dyskinesia (LID) in Parkinson’s disease patients based on multimodal neuroimaging, clinical and behavioral characteristics. She is one of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN) Global Scholars selected in 2022 to participate in the online MRI graduate program and clinical neuroimaging course at Oxford University, UK.

Ms. Shukla has completed her bachelor’s degree in zoology (H) from Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. Later, she pursued her master’s in medical biotechnology and graduated as a gold medalist from Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak. She has qualified exams such as CSIR-UGC NET JRF, GATE, BET, CEEB, IIT-JAM. Beyond academics, she loves to interact with people and acquire new skills. She is an outdoor enthusiast and loves to travel to natural places.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship tenure, Ms. Shukla is learning newer techniques in medical imaging for movement disorders, such as Neuromelanin MRI, and NODDI (neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging). She intends to draw meaningful inferences from the collected data with the help of a clinical neuroimaging expert.