Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize 2020 for Science & Technology has been awarded to 10 professors from across the country on Saturday. This award has been given away to the professors for their significant contributions in the field of science and technology. The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize was named after the founder Director of CSIR and is a prestigious award in Science and Technology in the country.

Professors from IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, Indian Statistical Institute, and many other government research organizations have received the award. Professors Subhadeep Chatterjee, Vatsala Thirumalai in Biological Sciences, Jyotirmayee Dash and Subi Jacob George in Chemical Sciences, Abhijit Mukherjee and Suryendu Dutta in Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Science, Amol Arvindrao Kulkarni and Kinshuk Dasgupta for Engineering Sciences and Rajat Subhra Hazra and U K Anandavardhanan in Mathematical Sciences have received the award.

Out of the 10 professors, two professors are from IIT Bombay who will be awarded the SSB Prize 2020- Prof. Suryendu Dutta and Prof. U. K. Anandavardhanan. With two recipients from IIT Bombay, Prof. Subhasis Chaudhuri, Director of IIT Bombay said, “Over the years, IIT Bombay has invested quite heavily in hiring a large number of highly-promising faculty members and tried its best in empowering them with some of the excellent experimental and computational facilities. We are delighted that our researchers are being recognized  for their high-quality research.”

One of the recipient Prof. Suryendu Dutta has been given this award for his invaluable contributions in the fields of organic geochemistry and molecular palaeobiology. Prof. Dutta’s innovation in the evolution of plant-derived terpenoids demonstrates how plant-derived organic matters are a major source of liquid hydrocarbons in many petroliferous basins of India.

Another recipient, Prof. U. K. Anandavardhanan receiving the news of the award said, “I am very happy to receive the news of the SSB Prize. I work in an area where one investigates certain algebraic structures called “groups” with a view towards “number theory” (called the Langlands program). I did my Ph.D. at the University of Hyderabad and postdoctoral research at TIFR, Mumbai. This is a good time to remember my teachers and mentors at these places. I moved to IIT Bombay in 2005, which’s been an excellent place for work all these years with friendly and outstanding colleagues and students.”

Meanwhile, IIT Bombay has appointed M S Unnikrishnan as  IITB-Monash Research Academy’s Chief Executive Officer, CEO on September 14, 2020. He would be succeeding Professor Murali Sastry, who has recently moved to the Faculty of Engineering, Monash University, Australia for fulltime research.