Shantanu Pradhan

Assistant Professor, Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras

[Department of Biotechnology IIT Madras @iitmbt]

Dept. of Biotechnology at IIT Madras is organizing a hands-on training workshop on Expansion Microscopy from July 20-23. Register soon for this exciting opportunity!

[Dibyendu Nandi @ydnad0]

While India has its fair share of issues in science funding and management, the pursuit of basic (theoretical) science is not one of them.

In its many publicly funded research and teaching institutions and universities, as faculty, we get full time salary across the year (unlike most US universities where you have to earn your summer salary from external grants). We have to teach, often perform some administrative duties, but we have complete freedom on pursuing our own research problem. In principle, therefore, India is a great place to do basic science if you do not need a lot of money and resources for it.

The latter is the heart of the issue. Large-scale public funding for science is becoming more and more restricted to few areas which are thought to be of immediate relevance in terms of applications, or societal relevance. So if your basic science pursuit needs expensive instruments or computational facilities - you are compromised. This is where the real problem is. This is also why India has produced many outstanding theoreticians over time, but very few top class experimentalists and computational modelers in the modern era.

While we will always desire that Government funding for science increases, careful consideration should also be given to balance the distribution of funds to maximise impact, given the existing talent pool.

A mistake we have often repeated over decades, in my opinion, is following trends established elsewhere in a different country; allocating disproportionately high funding through various agencies to those few specific areas - without first creating the talent necessary to efficiently exploit that funding.

On the one hand, this has allowed a lot of mediocrity to creep in and be funded without producing anything significant for the nation. On the other hand, the reduced allocation to general (open) science has compromised genuinely talented individuals - who already exist within the Indian scientific ecosystem, and could have scaled major grounds with additional support and put genuinely Indian innovation on the global map.

It is great to see a private foundation support the creation of a new theoretical science institute in Mumbai this week. In India, this continues to be a rarity, with private philanthropic funding and industry involvement in science remaining below par. We hope to see more philanthropic pioneers enter this space and support high end instrumentation and computational centers that are the pillars of modern scientific developments.

Concurrently, the central and state governments must work on enhancing and nurturing the scientific talent pool - the single most critical factor in the whole ecosystem is this human resource. There is, no alternative to this anywhere in the world over history. Governments have always been the scientists' closest ally. That bridge must not be broken.

[Shantanu Pradhan @PradhanLab]

Congratulations to Srashti Birla from Dept. of Biotechnology, IIT Madras for getting selected for the Bangalore Microscopy Course 2026! Wish her the best!

[Shantanu Pradhan @PradhanLab]

We conducted the Advanced Bioimaging Workshop 2026, May 18-20, in Dept. of Biotechnology, IIT Madras. Thank you to all the participants, speakers, trainers, sponsors and volunteers for making this a successful and educative event. @iitmbt

[Department of Biotechnology IIT Madras @iitmbt]

Dept. of Biotechnology, IIT Madras is organizing Workshop on Rheology and Soft Matter Mechanics in collaboration with Anton Paar. Register soon for this exciting hands-on-training opportunity!

[Nature Methods @naturemethods]

MOSAIC: a versatile multimodal microscopy that seamlessly transitions between light-sheet, 2-photon, label-free and super-resolution modalities. @Eric_Betzig @ABCUCBerkeley @legant_lab

https://t.co/l3NtYh3OrD

[Shantanu Pradhan @PradhanLab]

@ganitlabs Yes, because for many people, tone of the message is more important than the content of the message.

[Sanjeev Sanyal @sanjeevsanyal]

This is why "skin in the game" is such an important filter.

[kshitij vaze @VazeKshitij]

I got so, so much to say about this man. This is going to be long, so buckle up.

There is a mental block in Indians that stems from the British rule. Someone who sits in a cabin, surrounded by papers and constantly looking busy has historically been associated with power, intelligence, and importance. During the colonial era, this perception made perfect sense.

The people occupying those offices were not merely employees - they were extensions of the administrative machinery that governed the country. The clerk, the officer, the babu, the man behind the desk with stamps, files, and authority, represented access to power itself. Entire lives could be altered based on what happened inside those rooms. Naturally, generations grew up internalizing the idea that proximity to paperwork and administration equated to status.

The British left decades ago, but cultural conditioning does not disappear with a flag change. The structure survives long after the rulers are gone. Even today, Indians subconsciously associate office environments with success and dignity in a way they rarely do with industrial or technical labor.

A BPO employee wearing a formal shirt, sitting in an air-conditioned office and speaking English into a headset often commands more social respect than a CNC machinist capable of manufacturing components with tolerances tighter than a human hair. One is perceived as “corporate,” the other as “factory labor,” despite the latter possessing an extraordinarily specialized and economically valuable skillset.

And that disconnect says something deeply uncomfortable about how we value work.

A skilled machinist can take a raw block of metal and convert it into high-precision components that may end up in automobiles, aircraft, industrial robots, medical devices, or defense systems. That requires mathematical understanding, spatial reasoning, knowledge of materials, tooling strategy, machine behaviour, thermal expansion, tolerance stack-ups, feeds, speeds, vibration control, and process discipline. Mistakes are expensive.

Precision is unforgiving. The work has tangible consequences in the real world. Yet socially, this individual is often viewed as somehow “below” someone doing process documentation for a foreign client in an outsourcing firm.

India developed an economy where appearing professional became more important than producing something real. Entire generations were taught that escaping physical or industrial work was the ultimate marker of upward mobility. Parents wanted their children in offices because offices symbolized safety, cleanliness, English-speaking environments, and social elevation.

Factories, workshops, shop floors, and machine environments became associated with struggle rather than expertise. The tragedy is that this mindset emerged precisely in a country that desperately needed strong manufacturing capability to become economically self-sufficient.

You can see the consequences everywhere. We celebrate startup founders making apps that optimize food delivery by 3%, but rarely admire the people who understand tooling, fabrication, embedded systems, production engineering, process automation, or manufacturing reliability. We romanticize “corporate culture” while ignoring the fact that nations become powerful through industrial competence, not PowerPoint presentations.

A society that cannot respect the people capable of building and maintaining physical systems eventually becomes dependent on those who can.

The irony is almost absurd. The CNC machinist, the welder, the industrial technician, the maintenance engineer, the assembly line specialist - these are the people who convert engineering from theory into reality.

Without them, designs remain drawings and simulations remain fantasies. They are the interface between ideas and existence itself. Yet because their expertise exists on a shop floor instead of inside a glass office cabin, society often treats them as lesser.

And honestly, it makes me sick to witness.

[Alushin_Lab @Alushin_Lab]

Very pleased that after a rigorous (and lengthy) review process, our paper visualizing how myosin generated forces modulate actin filament structure for mechanosensitive recogntion by α-catenin has appeared in @Nature

https://t.co/gzEziWL8aB

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

A new feature @ScienceMagazine on the clusters of cells that enhance the spread of cancer, and what can be done to break them up @ScienceVisuals
https://t.co/xNAOF834mU

[Swapnil Srivastav @theswapnilsri]

Something small happened on my flight yesterday.

IndiGo flight. Sitting next to a guy, well put together, well dressed. The kind of person you’d point to and say “educated, aware.”

He finishes his snack. Looks at the trash in his hand. And places it on the floor under the seat in front. Not accidentally. Deliberately.

The cabin crew came through for trash collection. Did their job perfectly. Collected from everyone’s hands, every tray table. The stuff on the floor, easy to miss from that angle, stayed.

We landed. His cups and food box were still sitting there on the aircraft floor.

And I just sat with this feeling I couldn’t quite name.

It wasn’t anger. It was something closer to disappointment. Or maybe exhaustion.

Because we’ve been having this conversation about civic sense in India for decades now. And nothing moves.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe. It’s not an awareness problem. It’s not an education problem. It’s not even an income problem.

It’s a “whose problem is it” problem.

Most people in India have unconsciously decided that shared spaces, flights, roads, parks, footpaths, are not their responsibility. Someone is paid to clean it. Someone will handle it.

Me? I’m just passing through.

And that mindset is exactly where the problem begins.

Because civic sense isn’t just about what you do. It’s about what you normalize.

Every time someone litters and nobody reacts, the bar drops a little lower.

Every time someone cleans up after themselves in a space nobody’s watching, the bar rises.

We are all, quietly, setting the standard for each other.

Choose the standard you want to live in.

[Inna Vishik @InnaVishik]

Academics are not known for their EQ, but there are some scenarios where they put in all their effort to make it seem otherwise.
1) Responses to referee reports, which by decree, must be sufficiently obsequious, lest someone change their opinion for the worse. You cannot LLM your way out of this, the obsequiousness must come from your own heart.
2) Trying to gauge the emotional state of your dean (akin to an abusive relationship). Did we put in enough tit to receive that tat? Are we responding to all whims with sufficient joyful deference?

[Oded Rechavi @OdedRechavi]

Every PI

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

Ernst Chladni was a German physicist and musician, often called "the father of acoustics." In the late 18th century, he developed a technique that made sound visible: he sprinkled sand on metal plates and bowed them with a violin bow. The sand migrated to the nodal lines revealing geometric patterns now known as Chladni figures.

In 1808 when Napoleon saw the demonstration and was so impressed he offered a prize for the best mathematical explanation. Sophie Germain, a self-taught French mathematician was the only entrant who got the approach right - though her solution had some flaws. She became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity theory.

The math describing Chladni figures later showed up in quantum mechanics when Schrödinger used similar mathematics to describe electron orbitals.

[Jasveer Singh @jasveer10]

India isn’t dirty because people can’t clean, or lack civic sense. India is dirty because people genuinely believe it’s not their job. That belief comes from caste.

And that belief is not accidental. It comes straight from caste conditioning drilled into people for generations.

Caste in India was never just about hierarchy. It was about assigning work. And cleaning got pushed to the bottom. So now even today, people carry that same mindset without even realizing it. I am not the one who cleans.

You go to a park, people will eat, throw garbage, walk away. Not because they’re unaware. Their brain literally doesn’t even register that they should pick it up. Why. Because somewhere deep inside, they think cleaning is a ‘lower’ person’s job.

Same everywhere - Hill stations, rivers, tourist spots. Trash it and leave. Not laziness. Conditioning.

Compare this with somewhere like Singapore - You eat at a place, people clean their own table. They carry tissues, wipe it, and throw garbage properly. Why? Because they don’t think it’s someone else’s job.

Even Sri Lanka feels cleaner than India!

And then we pretend it’s a Swachh Bharat problem. You can run a hundred Swachh Bharat campaigns. Put dustbins every ten steps. Nothing changes. Because the problem is not infrastructure. It’s identity.

[GhoshRoyLab @GhoshRoyLab]

| PNAS https://t.co/LCWuqHIGoO
The much-awaited publication from the lab is online now. Great teamwork led by @singhpallavi96 and the dendrite team in the lab. A new mechanism for dendrite regeneration, discovered using worm model at @DBT_NBRC @BricDbt @India_Alliance

[Denis Wirtz @deniswirtz]

Here is our updated database of grants for early careers researchers in all fields.

It goes way beyond traditional NIH and NSF funding opportunities. We list 428 types of grants.

Download it here: https://t.co/RGXGrdp2uf