Dr Jyotirmayee Dash Wins Prestigious 2020 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize For Chemical Sciences

Odia scientist Dr Jyotirmayee Dash won the 2020 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Chemical Sciences. The awards for this year were declared during the ceremony of the 79th Foundation Day of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), held in Delhi. Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize is considered to be the highest trophies in the field of science in India, and Dash is one of 12 recipients this year, sharing her coveted prize with Subi Jacob George.

There are only two other women on the list to have received these top awards - Vatsala Thirumalai for Biological Sciences and Bushra Ateeq for Medical Sciences.

Also Read: 7 Indian Virologists Who Are Leading Breakthroughs around the World

About Dr Jyotirmayee Dash

Dr Jyotirmayee Dash has been associated with the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Jadavpur, Kolkata since 2009 in the capacity of assistant professor. She is a PhD holder from IIT Kanpur, and an awardee of prestigious fellowships such as the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship and Marie Curie fellowship. She was the only woman nominee among 11 others for the Swarnajayanti fellowship award 2015-16.

Among other areas, her work has also been focused on research into cancer. In 2017, The Hindu quoted her as saying, "My group intends to synthesise small drug molecules that selectively bind to DNA secondary structures and regulate oncogene expression. The small drug molecules have the potential to be anticancer agents. We also intend developing membrane channels that can deliver small drug molecules to cancer cells.”

Also Read: Kavitha Gopal First Girl To Bag 'President Of India Prize' At IIT Madras

Other Notable Women In Science Today

Several Indian women are breaking glass ceilings in the field of science and technology today. The mother-daughter duo of Dr Jayanthi Shastri and Dr Aditi Shastri proposed this year that the presence of testicles in men makes them more vulnerable to longer and more severe cases COVID-19. In an interview with SheThePeople, they told us about their research and how they managed to conduct it across continents. "My mother and I are very close and we speak almost every day. We are both in the car when we speak. I’m driving to work here early in the morning in New York and she is getting home after a long day of work in Mumbai. This research idea materialized out of our daily conversations."

Recently, Indian origin researcher Shruti Puri was named one of the finalists at the 2020 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists. Professor Puri is a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. She was shortlisted as a finalist in the “Physical Sciences and Engineering” category. She was recognised for her extraordinary “theoretical discoveries in quantum information storage and quantum computing, which is part of her postdoctoral work.

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