Dr Alok Bhattacharya – Chairman , ORDI Scientific Committee .
Alok Bhattacharya was trained at IIT Kanpur, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, National Cancer Institute, USA and Harvard Medical School, USA. He has contributed extensively in the area of infectious diseases, the biology of parasitic pathogens and genomics. He had initiated one of the first teaching and research programs on Bioinformatics and Computation Biology in India.
Alok has been involved in genome sequencing, developing DNA sequence analysis tools and techniques and finding patterns in DNA sequence apart from investigating basic biology of parasites. His current interest is rare genetic disorders and finding treatment for these diseases. He is championing promotion of research for finding a cure for genetic disorders. He has also initiated research in this area and written a number of policy articles on rare diseases and drug discovery. He and his family along with friends have set up a charitable trust “World Without GNE-Myopathy (India) to achieve some of the goals. He has also been helping different Government agencies in implementation of Science and Technology policies as a member/co-chair/chair of different committees.
For his vast contributions, he has been awarded many prestigious fellowships and awards, such as Robert McNamara Fellowship (World Bank), Rockefeller Biotechnology Career Development Award, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize, and JC Bose Fellowship. He is also a fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian Academy of Sciences. He was also a vice-president of INSA.
Dr. Deepthi Chug
Dr. Deepti Chugh is a neuroscientist with expertise in the field of epilepsy, neuroinflammation, and neuromuscular disorders. She received her doctorate in Neurobiology from Lund University, Sweden, with a focus on neuroinflammation and adult hippocampus neurogenesis in epilepsy. Later, as a postdoctoral scholar at Ohio State University, USA, she investigated the pathophysiology of neuromuscular disorders utilizing multiple electrophysiological approaches. She has more than a decade of experience in preclinical animal models of neurological disorders and has published in several peer-reviewed journals. Currently, she is employed as a research fellow at IIT Kanpur apart from her role as a scientific advisor at Eywa Neuro.
