Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awards - 2007


Check out this year's winners (pdf) of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awards of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

I am pleased to find IISc represented quite well in that list: Prof. N. Srinivasan (Biological Sciences) and Prof. P.N. Rangarajan (Medical Sciences).

In addition, the two winners in Engineering Sciences are good friends: Prof. B.S. Murty (Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, IIT-M) and Prof. Rama Govindarajan. That they are both IISc alumni is the icing on the cake!

With the announcement of this year's SSB awards, my friends' circle now has a 'Bhatnagar couple'! [Rama's husband, Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy (Department of Physics, IISc), won the Physics Bhatnagar in 2000.]

Special congratulations to all these great folks!

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You do know that I refer to the Bhatnagar Awards as the Oscars of Indian Science, don't you? My posts about previous years' awards are here and here.

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I have to chide CSIR (I did it last year, too!) for the way it announces its highest awards. Is it too much to expect CSIR to put together a press release with more information about the scientists' background, their work, and why India's biggest and most prestigious science awards are going to them? Can't they get the Prize Committee(s) to write up a one-page citation for each winner to be issued along with the press release?

3 Comments:

  1. Wavefunction said...

    "That they are both IISc alumni is the icing on the cake!"

    Now why do I feel that the probability of that happening is not too low...

  2. Anonymous said...

    Ashotosh:
    Your feeling is right. In fact, at least 5 out of 11 Bhatnagar receipients this year are PhDs from IISc. As such I suspect a large fraction of the awardees are PhDs from India!

  3. Anonymous said...

    For your kind notice, all awardees belong to Institute and have some how associated with south. Is there no research in University??