Vijyoshi - 2019 National Science Camp 06-08 December 2019
J.N. Tata Auditorium, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru FOUNDED BY
Department of Science and Technology Government of India
ORGANISERS
INSPIRE Program, Government of India FOUNDED BY 6 - 8 December 2019
The aim of the annual National Science (Vijyoshi) Camps is to provide a forum for interactions between bright young students and leading researchers in various branches of science and mathematics. With boundaries between disciplines fast disappearing, these camps serve as an ideal platform for the young participants to get an exciting global viewpoint of questions relating to basic sciences as well as application Department of Science and Technology oriented themes. Government of India As in the previous meetings, a comprehensive programme has been designed for the participants. This includes thought ORGANISERS provoking lectures followed by a round of discussion at the end of each day’s programme. Apart from all this, the previous meetings have ultimately served to motivate and inspire the participants by bringing them together, in what is hoped will be their first step towards a career in research in the basic sciences and mathematics.
Prof. A K Nandakumaran Convener Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru – 560 012
A Program of Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India
Organised by KISHORE VAIGYANIK PROTSAHAN YOJANA and
NATIONAL SCIENCE (VIJYOSHI) CAMP - 2019 INSPIRE PROGRAM INSPIRE Program, Government of India 1 Program - 6/12/2019 08.00 – 09.00 Breakfast
09.00 – 09.30 Inauguration
09.00 – 09.05 Welcome speech Prof. A K Nandakumaran, Convener, KVPY
09.05 – 09.15 Inaugural address Prof. Anurag Kumar Director Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
09.15 – 09.20 Vote of Thanks Prof. Santanu Mukherjee
09.20 - 10.00 Photo session followed by High Tea
10.00 - 11.15 Lecture 1
Speaker Prof. Kankan Bhattacharyya Title: Seeing Tiny Things - A Tale of Two Nobels in Last Five years
Session Chair Prof. Biman Bagchi
11.15 - 12.30 Lecture 2
Speaker Prof. Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath Title: Human Brain: Complexity Behind Simplicity
Session Chair Prof. Sandhya Visweswariah
12.30 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.15 Lecture 3
Speaker Prof. Peter R. Saulson Title: Listening to the Universe with Gravitational Waves
Session Chair Prof. S. Asokan
15.15 - 16.30 Lecture 4
Speaker Prof. Dipendra Prasad Title: An Overview of Mathematics for Young Students
Session Chair Prof. Apoorva Khare
16.45 - 17.30 Interactive Session with Speakers from L1-L3
17.30 - 18.00 Tea / Coffee
2 Program - 7/12/2019 08.00 – 09.00 Breakfast
09.30 - 10.45 Lecture 5
Speaker Prof. Sundaram Thangavelu Title: Proofs from the Book
Session Chair Prof. Phoolan Prasad
10.45 - 11.30 Tea / Coffee
11.30 - 12.30 Interactive Session with Speakers from L4-L5
12.30 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 16.00 Cultural Program
16.00 – 16.30 Tea / Coffee
16.30 – 17.15 Interactive Session with Prof. Nagasuma Chandra (Associate Dean, UG Program, IISc Bengaluru)
17.15 – 19.15 Lecture 6
Speaker Prof. Uday Maitra Title: Part-I: A Periodic Table with a Difference! Part-II: Learning Chemistry through Experiments
Session Chair Prof. P. K. Das
19.15 – 20.15 Dinner
3 Program - 8/12/2019 08.00 – 09.00 Breakfast
09.30 - 10.45 Lecture 7
Speaker Prof. Marlene Zuk Title: Sexual Selection and the Evolution of Animal Signals
Session Chair Prof. Maria Thaker
10.45 - 11.15 Tea / Coffee
11.15 - 12.30 Lecture 8
Speaker Prof. Rahul Pandit Title: Life-Threatening Cardiac Arrhythmias: What Can We Learn from Numerical Studies of Mathematical Models for Cardiac Tissue
Session Chair Prof. H. R. Krishnamurthy
12.30 – 13.00 Interactive Session with Speakers from L7-L8
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.15 Lecture 9
Speaker Prof. Sanat Kumar Title: Grafted Nanoparticles Offer a Unique Suite of Properties Relevant to Sustainability Applications
Session Chair Prof. Jaydeep Basu
15.15 – 15.45 Interactive Session with Speaker from L9
15.45 - 16.30 Concluding remarks
16.30 - 17.15 High Tea and Departure
4 Lecture 1 Seeing Tiny Things - A Tale of Two Nobels in Last Five years
Prof. Kankan Bhattacharyya Chemistry Department, IISER Bhopal
One of the long standing dreams of science is to see tiny small things like one single molecule or an isolated live cell. Elementary kinetic theory of gas predicts that every molecule is different in terms of average velocity. In all scientific experiments, however, we deal with very large number of molecules – of the order of Avogadro Number. Thus the individual properties of the molecules are averaged out. In 2014, William Moerner, Eric Betzig and Stefan Hell received the Chemistry Nobel Prize for developing what is known as Single Molecule Spectroscopy. One half of the 2018 Physics Nobel prize is awarded to Arthur Ashkin. Ashkin invented Optical Tweezer to make small polymer particles or biological cells stationary within the focus of a laser beam and subsequently, transporting and manipulating them. In my talk, I will discuss these two amazing discoveries and finally, may add a little of our own work.
5 Prof. Kankan Bhattacharyya
Prof. Kankan Bhattacharyya is a modern non-linear laser spectroscopy scientist. His main interest is in femtosecond dynamics in nano-confined systems that include biological assemblies. His primary discovery is the ultraslow nature of biological water.
He was the director and chair professor of Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata. He is a fellow of all of the national science academies of India and a senior editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry. He has received awards from many countries; most notably, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Chemical Science from the (CSIR, India) in 1997 and the TWAS Prize in 2007.
He graduated from Presidency College under Calcutta University, and achieved his master’s at the same university. He did his doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Mihir Chowdhury, an eminent scientist in the field of molecular spectroscopy and photochemistry at IACS (1984).
Currently he is a Visiting Professor at Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal.
6 Lecture 2 Human Brain: Complexity Behind Simplicity
Prof. V. Ravindranath Centre for Brain Research, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560012
The human brain is the interpreter of our senses, controller of movement and in fact responsible for all we embrace as civilisation. It consists of about 100 billion nerve cells which are interconnected through a million billion connections measuring up to 3.2 million kilometre of wiring. This wiring is essential for performing simplest to the most complex tasks. In the last two decades we have witnessed an explosion of knowledge in neuroscience. The stage is set for a more thorough understanding of the brain and for translating this knowledge into strategies to protect the brain from the vagaries of nature, both genetic and environmental. In order to achieve this goal, neuroscience research has accommodated multidisciplinary methods integrating the many levels of functional organisation of the brain, from molecules to neurons to networks to systems and behaviour.
Apart from the interest in understanding how the brain performs cognitive functions and finding links between behaviour, brain and mind, there are serious health related issues. Brain-related disorders affect large sections of population and contribute up to one-third of the total disease burden in both developing and developed nations. From birth to old age, a host of neurological and mental illnesses afflict mankind. Most of these are poorly understood and treatments are palliative rather than curative. Through the study of the normal brain and its disorders, brain research can help development of children, enrich adult life, and help us age gracefully.
7 Prof. V. Ravindranath
Dr. Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath obtained her Ph.D from the University of Mysore in 1981. In 1986, after completing her post-doctoral training at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA, she joined the Department of Neurochemistry at National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, (NIMHANS) Bengaluru. In 1999, she established the National Brain Research Centre (NBRC), an autonomous institution of DBT, Ministry of Science and Technology, where she continued until 2009. She returned to Bangalore at the Indian Institute of Science as Professor as the Founder Chair of the Centre for Neuroscience. She is currently the Founder Director, Centre for Brain Research (CBR) at Indian Institute of Science.
Dr. Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath is elected Fellow of all the 3 science academies in the country, namely Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India. She is alsoa Fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences, India, Indian Academy of Neurosciences and Third World Academy of Sciences. She is a recipient of the prestigious S.S. Bhatnagar award (1996), Omprakash Bhasin Award (2001) and the J.C. Bose National Fellowship (2006), S.S. Bhatnagar Medal, INSA (2016) and Padma Shri (2010).
8 Lecture 3 Listening to the Universe with Gravitational Waves
Prof. Peter R. Saulson Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics at Syracuse University, NY, USA Former Spokesperson, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration
On Sept. 14, 2015, a gravitational wave signal was received by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). It was generated by the collision of two black holes, each around 30 times as massive as the sun, about 1.3 billion light years away. The signal, the first ever reception of gravitational waves, tells the story of the last two tenths of a second of the lives of those two black holes, and the first few milliseconds of the life of the 60 solar mass black hole that they formed.
Since then, LIGO and its sister project Virgo in Europe have heard signals from a number of other collisions; the most spectacular was the reception on August 17, 2017 of the signal of a collision between two neutron stars, similar in “sound” to a black hole collision, but in this case also accompanied by flashes of gamma rays, visible light, radio waves and X-rays. Soon, LIGO-India will join the world-wide network, enabling even more precise observations.
The talk will explain what gravitational waves are, how we detect them, and how new observations in the coming decades will expand our knowledge of the universe.
9 Prof. Peter R. Saulson
Peter Saulson is the Martin A. Pomerantz’ 37 Professor of Physics at Syracuse University. He has been on the faculty at Syracuse since 1991.
Saulson’s research career has been focused on the search for gravitational waves, in particular on the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). One of the early leaders of the field, he served two terms as the elected Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. On September 14, 2015, the LIGO team’s efforts were rewarded with the first-ever discovery of a gravitational wave signal, coming from two black holes that had collided over 1 billion light years away. For his leadership role, Saulson is a recipient of the 2017 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery.
Saulson attended Harvard College, earning his A. B. magna cum laude in Physics in 1976. He then went to Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1981 with a dissertation on a search for dark matter. He then took a research position at MIT with Prof. Rai Weiss, one of the inventors of LIGO. Saulson helped to lead early engineering design studies, and was one of the authors of the “Blue Book” that made the case for building LIGO.
At Syracuse, Saulson’s research focused on discovering the best ways to construct and hold the mirrors that are at the core of the LIGO detectors. His research group showed that fused silica (ultra-pure glass) was the best material for both the mirrors and the fine wires that support them. Later, he turned to the problem of how LIGO would distinguish real gravitational wave signals from fakes that might be generated within the instrument’s components. His group developed some of the key tests that helped to establish that LIGO’s discovery was genuine.
Saulson is the author of Fundamentals of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors (1994, second edition 2017), the first introductory textbook in the field.
10 Lecture 4 An Overview of Mathematics for Young Students
Prof. Dipendra Prasad Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
The lecture will aim to give a panormic view of mathematics from Algebra and Number theory to Calculus and Geometry, how they have developed over the years, interacting with each other.
11 Prof. Dipendra Prasad
Prof. Dipendra Prasad, a leading figure in the theory of representations, was born in Ghazipur, Eastern Uttar Pradesh, where he had his basic education. He got his Bachelor’s degree studying in St Xavier’s college Mumbai, Masters at IIT Kanpur and PhD from Harvard University. On return to India, he has been associated with Tata Institute in Mumbai, Harish-Chandra Research Institute in Allahabad, and now at IIT Mumbai. His principal area of research has been in the local and global aspects of the theory of automorphic representations. He has been involved in understanding a basic question in representation theory over local and global fields: how do representation of these groups decompose when restricted to subgroups. He has several articles in top class journals like: Compositio Math, Duke J. Math, Advances in Mathematics, American J. Maths, to name a few.
His awards and other honors include: J. C. Bose National fellowship, Swarnajayanthi fellowship, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize, Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences Bangalore and Indian National Science Academy, Invited speaker at ICM 2018, TWAS prize in Math for the year 2019. He is also editor of several journals.
12 Lecture 5 Proofs from the Book
Prof. Sundaram Thangavelu Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
The world of Mathematics is devoid of myths and beliefs. Still there exists the notion of the Book, kept beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, where the most elegant proofs of all the theorems in Mathematics could be found. Scattered in the vast ocean of Mathematics we do come across proofs which look as though they are straight from the Book. In this lecture we try to present some of these proofs for the pure intellectual satisfaction of the audience.
13 Prof. Sundaram Thangavelu
Prof. Sundaram Thangavelu was born in a small village in Tamilnadu in 1957. Studying at a nearby town he got his M.Sc from Madras University (1980) and later obtained M.A and Ph.D from Princeton University (1987). After long associations with TIFR-CAM and Indian Statistical Institute, he moved to Indian Institute of Science in 2005. He works in the broad area of Harmonic Analysis which lies at the interface between pure and applied Mathematics. He has made significant contributions to harmonic analysis on Heisenberg groups, symmetric spaces and Euclidean spaces. He has authored more than one hundred papers and three monographs. Having supervised several PhD students and mentored many post-doctoral fellows, he has been instrumental (along with other senior harmonic analysts) in building a large group of harmonic analysts in the country.
He is the recipient of B.M.Birla Science Prize (1996) and S.S. Bhatnagar award (2002) and J.C.Bose National Fellowship (2008- 2022); Elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (1997) and Indian National Science Academy (2002).
14 Lecture 6 Part-I: A Periodic Table with a Difference! Part-II: Learning Chemistry through Experiments
Prof. Uday Maitra Department of Organic Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Part-I: Russian Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table, published in 1869, was the most important and creative way to organize elements known (and unknown!) at that time. This work demonstrated a beautiful periodicity in the properties of the elements. The periodic table also allowed Mendeleev to make some predictions which were found to be true after the discovery of several new elements subsequently. Despite minor changes, the basic organization of the periodic table has not changed very much.
In this lecture I plan to discuss part of the history on the discovery of elements, and then show a few modern versions of the periodic table presented in multiple ways to connect them with real-life. I will also discuss, in detail, the use of isotopes of elements for a few interesting applications.
Part-II: In many schools and colleges chemistry is often taught ‘theoretically’, without showing experiments connected with the theory being taught. Much of our teaching processes also ignores applications of chemistry in real life. This is unfortunate as chemistry is essentially an experimental subject and plays an important role in our daily life. The choice of simple experiments to understand principles of chemistry can make the students learn and appreciate chemistry and its applications.
In this lecture-demonstration I will try to highlight the importance of doing simple experiments to learn a few chemistry principles.
15 Prof. Uday Maitra
After his BSc from Presidency College, Calcutta and MSc from IIT Kanpur, Uday Maitra received his M. Phil and PhD from Columbia University in 1986 working with Prof. Ronald Breslow. Following a postdoctoral stay at the University of California at Berkeley with Prof. Paul Bartlett, he returned to India, and after a year at IIT Kanpur moved to IISc Bengaluru in 1989.
His research interests are in the Chemistry of Bile acids; Hydrogels, Metallohydrogels and Organogels; Organic-inorganic hybrid materials; Enzyme sensing, etc. His group has recently developed a general strategy for low cost, paper based photo-luminescent enzyme sensors.
He is also greatly interested in Chemistry Education and is a regular participant in a variety of outreach programmes for high school and undergraduate students. He has received a number of awards and honours including the S.S. Bhatnagar Award in Chemical Sciences in 2001, and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy.
16 Lecture 7 Sexual Selection and the Evolution of Animal Signals
Prof. Marlene Zuk Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, MN, USA
Why are males and females similar in some species and vastly different in others? And why do the members of one sex often bear traits that are costly at best and potentially harmful at worst? The answer is sexual selection, an evolutionary process first explained by Charles Darwin. I will explain the enormous variety of characteristics used in mating, and show what happens when natural selection and sexual selection conflict.
17 Prof. Marlene Zuk
Prof. Zuk obtained her PhD from the University of Michigan, and was a postdoc at the University of New Mexico before becoming a faculty member at the University of California at Riverside. After a number of years there, she joined the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota in 2012, where she is now a Regents Professor and the Associate Dean for Faculty in the College of Biological Sciences.
In addition to being the author of many scientific articles, Prof. Zuk has written for newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and has also authored four books for the public, mainly on animal behaviour, evolution, and insects.
She has been President of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology, and is an elected Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has Honorary Doctorates from Uppsala University in Sweden and Jyväskylä University in Finland. In addition, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences, USA.
18 Lecture 8 Life-Threatening Cardiac Arrhythmias: What Can We Learn from Numerical Studies of Mathematical Models for Cardiac Tissue
Prof. Rahul Pandit Centre for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Cardiac arrhythmias, like ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF), are responsible for one out of every six deaths inthe industrialised world. The talk will begin with brief introductions to mammalian hearts, their electrophysiology, cardiac arrhythmias, and defibrillation. Mathematical models for cardiac cells and cardiac tissue will be described. The results of numerical simulations of such models will be presented and the relevance of these results to cardiac arrhythmias and defibrillation will be discussed.
19 Prof. Rahul Pandit
Rahul Pandit is Professor of Physics and Chair of the Division of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India. He obtained his MS in Physics from IIT Delhi and his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is the Chair of the C3 Commission for Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), a Vice President of IUPAP, an Honorary Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India, and he serves on the Board of Directors of Science Gallery Bengaluru. He has been a Divisional Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters; and he is a member of the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports. He is a recipient of the S.S. Bhatnagar and Meghnad Saha Awards, and of the J.C.Bose National Fellowship. He is an elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, and The World Academy of Sciences. He works on the Physics and Computational Science of Turbulence, in Fluids, Plasmas, Superfluids, and Complex Fluids, Electrical-wave Turbulence and Cardiac Arrhythmias, and Cold-atom Systems.
20 Lecture 9 Grafted Nanoparticles Offer a Unique Suite of Properties Relevant to Sustainability Applications
Prof. Sanat Kumar Department of Chemical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Polymer membranes are employed in several critical sustainability applications involving the separation of gas mixtures based onsize differences. In spite of their widespread use, important performance challenges remain outstanding - the need to dramatically affect the transport of a desired mixture component and improving mechanical resilience relative to the current state-of-the-art. Here, we develop novel membranes based on polymer-grafted nanoparticles (GNPs) which possess controllable, spatially inhomogeneous gas transport behavior. Our ability to create and tune spatial inhomogeneities in GNPs, apparently through judicious manipulation of chain entropy, is thus a new, apparently general, physics-based paradigm to design membranes with unprecedented performance even using common polymers.
In addition to this technical material I will also comment on my own career arc, the lessons learned in terms of following your own career (and life) map, and the need to develop a range of social skills all of which have to come together in the realization of life-long goals.
21 Prof. Sanat Kumar
Prof. Sanat Kumar is the Bykhovsky Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University, where he was also Chair of the department ’10-’16. Before that he was a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (’02-’06) and at Pennsylvania State University (’88-’02). He obtained his degrees in Chemical Engineering, including his BTech at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India (’81) and MS (’84) and ScD (’87) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently an Associate Editor for Soft Matter, and is on the editorial board of Progress in Polymer Science and the Annual Reviews of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. His research interests are mainly on hybrid materials with a special focus on sustainability applications, e.g., creation of membranes for selective transport of gases, ions and water and in biomimetic materials.
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