This year’s Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize winners include Dr Amit Agrawal, 44, for his work on microdevices and fluid dynamics, Swadhin Kumar Mandal, 44, for developing sustainable chemical processes, Dr Parthasarathi Chakraborthy, 44, for his work on metal-binding ligands in oceanic biogeochemistry, Ganesh Nagaraju, 45, for his work on DNA damage and repair pathways, Thomas Pucadyil, 42, for his work on biological sciences, Dr Rahul Banerjee, 45, for the work on hydrogen storage, Co2 capture and methane storage, Ashwin Gumaste, 42, for his research on Telecom, and Dr Amit Kumar, 42, for his work on combinatorial optimisation and graph theoretic algorithms.
Ambarish Ghosh, 44, for nanomotors to improve drug delivery, Dr Nitin Saxena, 41, for Algebraic Complexity, Madineni Venkat Ratnam, 45, for the work on middle-atmosphere, Ganesan Venkata Subramanian, 43, for the work on schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, and Dr Aditi Sen De, 44, for the work on quantum information and computation.
The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology is the most coveted prize for science in India. The prize was named after Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the founder Director of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR).
The prize is open to any citizen of India under the age of 45 and who is conducting research in one of the seven disciplines including Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Medical Sciences and Physical Sciences. Each discipline can have up to two winners. prize is based primarily on research done in India over the preceding five years and comes with a cash prize of ₹five lakh.