Young scientists awarded at Science Congress

Shubha Vij from Delhi Kuheli Biswas from Shillong were among 13 scientists who were honoured on Friday with the ISCA Young Scientists' Awards by President A P J Abdul Kalam at the Indian Science Congress in Chidambaram.

Vij, a scientist with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Plant Genomics and Department of Plant Molecular Biology of the Delhi University, was awarded for her research on rice, while Biswas, a PhD scholar from the North-Eastern Hill University, was chosen for her study of the role of nitrogen oxide to enhance survival of air-breathing catfish under adverse ecological and pathological conditions.

Kalam gave away the awards at a glittering function at the 94th Indian Science Congress at the Annamalai University in Chidambaram.

Gogate, a scientist with the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, received the award for research in Chemical Engineering.

The other awardees are D N Kambrekar (University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad), Nallusamy Anandraja (Tamil Nadu Agriculture University, Madurai), Vinod Kumar (Kurukshetra University) Rajeev Saraswat (National Institute of Oceanography, Goa), Manish Tiwari (Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad), Partha Sarathi Mandal (Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata), Diksha Kaushik (Bhopal University), Chandan Chakraborty (IIT, Kharagpur), S Vidyadhara (Mahatma Gandhi Medical College Hospital and Research Institute, Puducherry), and Nihar Ranjan Jena (Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi).

The awards given by the Indian Science Congress Association carry a certificate and Rs 25,000 cash for each awardee. This year Annamalai University, the hosts of the Congress, have given Rs 10,000 cash to each of the awardees.