Here is a picture that represents the gestation of Project Prakash. In order to get a first-hand sense of childhood blindness in India, Prof. Pawan Sinha visited a few places in the country, distant from the ambit of urban medical care facilities. Here he is working in a village with a young girl who gained sight in one eye at the age of 7 years. She is 11 years old in this picture. Also seen in the picture is Dr. Asim Sil, an ophthalmologist who [...]

Abha Sur is part of the humanities faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a physical chemist, she taught the subject and also published several papers on laser spectroscopy, her field of specialization. Then, the focus of her research shifted, taking her from the lab bench to the library archives. She wanted to find out more about the life and times of India’s first Nobel Laureate. Sir C. V. Raman’s (1888- 1970) name is immortalized in science because he demonstrated the molecular scattering of [...]

Margaret Lowman is a pioneer in canopy science, a subset of field biology, and the author of the best-selling Life in the Treetops. She also co-authored It is a Jungle up there with her two sons. A professor at North Carolina State University and Director of the Nature Research Center in Raleigh, she is currently a Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar to India. Q Why is it so important to study life in the treetops? A Forest canopies are the interface between atmosphere and earth — [...]

Snakebite, a recent inclusion to the list of neglected tropical diseases drawn up by the World Health Organization, could be the most neglected of all neglected tropical diseases in the 21st century, says David Warrell, Emeritus Professor of Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford. India has long been considered as the nation with high incidence of snakebites but the full extent of this public health problem remained unknown. Published data from the late 19th and early 20th centuries suggested that the annual snakebite mortality [...]

Prof. Rohini Godbole, particle physicist, is a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In a parallel universe, she would have been a Bank of Maharasthra employee: she was offered a job after she topped Pune University in B.Sc., Physics. “The salary was almost as much as my father’s at that time,” she recalls. A scholarly life, she decided, would suit her better. Today, she is part of a select group of scientists who will decide the design of the next-generation particle accelerator based [...]