Girish Sahni, the CSIR director general, said that no suitable candidate could be found for the prize in the mathematical sciences category.
Sunderarajan Padmanabhan writes for India Science Wire.
New Delhi: The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) announced winners of its prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for excellence in science and technology for 2017 on September 28.
Deepak Thankappan Nair of the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad, and Sanjeev Das of the Molecular Oncology Laboratory at the National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi, have won the prize for biological sciences, while G. Naresh Patwari of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, has got the prize for chemical sciences. S. Suresh Babu of Space Physics Laboratory at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, has bagged it for earth, atmosphere, ocean and planetary sciences.
The other winners are:
- Engineering sciences – Aloke Paul, Department of Materials Engineering, and Neelesh B. Mehta, Department of Electrical Communication, both at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
- Medical sciences – Amit Dutt, Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer, Tata Memorial Centre, Navi Mumbai, and Deepak Gaur, School of Biotechnology, Jawaharlal Nehru University
- Physical sciences – Nissim Kanekar, National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune, and D. Vinay Gupta, CSIR National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi
Making the announcement, Girish Sahni, the CSIR director general, said that no suitable candidate could be found for the prize in the mathematical sciences category. The S.S. Bhatnagar prize is one of the most prestigious multidisciplinary science awards in the country. It was instituted in 1958 in honour of the late Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the founder of the CSIR labs, and carries a cash component of Rs 5 lakh.
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The awards were announced at a function to mark the 76th Foundation of CSIR. On the occasion, President Ram Nath Kovind also presented the CSIR Young Scientists Awards for 2017. The winners are:
- Sakhya Singha Sen, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune
- Prosenjit Das, Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute, Durgapur
- Sathravada Balaji, Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Kolkata, and
- Amit Laddi, Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, Chandigarh.
The president also presented the special gold medal of excellence in biological sciences and technology, named after the eminent biologist G.N. Ramachandran, to Kandala Venkata Ramana Chary of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.
The CSIR Technology Awards were presented to various labs to encourage multidisciplinary in-house team efforts and external interactions for technology development, transfer and commercialisation. The awardees are:
- Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology
- Central Road Research Institute
- Central Leather Research Institute
- Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute, and
- Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research