Director's Meesage
Reflections for the year 2025
New Year greetings. Let us wish ourselves a productive and peaceful 2026.
Allow me to take a few minutes of your time to reflect on the year that is ending and on what we hope to achieve in the new year.
Year 2025 — what a year it was! It flew by before we knew it had started, but it has left behind many deep scars, some relief, and a few happy smiles for science, society, and the environment.
At NCBS, 2025 has been a year of consolidation and strengthening. Across scales of biology, our research has continued to push boundaries, combining depth with breadth and curiosity with rigour. While metrics such as publications and grants remain important, the increasing cross-talk between theory and experiment and the momentum of interdisciplinary science are particularly encouraging. Greater integration of computation, data science, and AI-driven approaches with experimental biology is now becoming routine rather than exceptional. These tools are not just helping us do old things faster, but are enabling us to ask new kinds of questions. At the same time, it is heartening to see sustained attention to careful experimentation, long-term data collection, and ecological monitoring—reminding us that good science still depends on thoughtful observation and persistence.
This trend has resulted in several new initiatives of the year: the setting up of the Centre for Artificial Learning and Intelligence for Biological Research and Education (CALIBRE) in collaboration with the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) (supported by philanthropists Vishal and Deepshikha Gupta of Reed India Consulting LLP); the launch of new field biology courses (supported by the Murty Trust); expansion of forest officers' training; the inclusion of more international students in our Wildlife MSc programme (supported by the Global Environment Fund of the World Bank); and the establishment of the Physics of Life Chair professorship (supported by TTK-Prestige), among others.
In 2025, we welcomed new faculty (Pratik Kumar, a card-carrying chemistry researcher, and Preeti Agarwal, a developmental biology and mechanobiology expert), students, and staff, each bringing fresh perspectives and energy. Madan Rao, while superannuated, will continue to work with us as the Physics of Life Chair Professor.
This year's high-impact research outcomes run to pages, making it difficult to highlight only a few. They span scales, as reflected in their titles—integrative structural modelling of macromolecular assemblies; observations that mutation bias alters the distribution of fitness effects; deeper insights into membrane contact site biology; epigenetic regulation of salt-stress responses; and two decades of follow-up studies on tiger populations, among many others.
Decades of high-quality research have resulted in numerous peer recognitions and honours for our faculty, reflecting the national and international respect our work commands. To name a few: Anjana Badrinarayanan was selected for the Infosys Prize 2025 in Life Sciences; Deepa Agashe received the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar: Vigyan Yuva (formerly the CSIR–Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award) 2025, conferred by the Government of India; P. V. Shivaprasad received the Tata Transformation Prize 2025; Deepa Agashe was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences; Uma Ramakrishnan was elected an Associate Member of EMBO; Mahesh Sankaran was awarded the J. C. Bose Fellowship; Tapomoy Bhattacharjee was elected an EMBO Young Investigator and received the Merck Young Scientist Award; Soumyashree Das was elected an EMBO Global Investigator; and Ranabir Das was awarded the CRS Silver Medal Award. This year also witnessed the first cover story in the 137-year-old National Geographic on Indian biodiversity work, part of which featured Uma Ramakrishnan's work on black tigers.
Our Archives@NCBS has added many valuable collections, enabling research scholars to uncover previously dust-covered gems of scientific discoveries and stories from the past, while also inspiring ideas for modern science. The work of Meetings, Outreach, Research Communicaitons office is multiplied many folds in just one year making NCBS/BLiSC more visible than before and bringing new collaborators and partners from across India and across the globe.
None of this would be possible without the dedication and commitment of our academic, research and development, technical, engineering, administrative, finance, and support staff. Often working behind the scenes, they ensure the Centre runs smoothly, enabling the rest of us to focus on research, teaching, and outreach. Through their efforts, the campus remains functional, safe, clean, and serene, making it a place one never wants to leave.
Our partners in the Bengaluru Life Science Cluster (BLiSC) also had a remarkable 2025, with high-impact work emerging from their labs. Results from continued environmental surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 are compelling enough to silence vaccine sceptics. Work on embryoids and organoids, and on the metabolic control of early development, is yielding unprecedented insights into cellular interactions and complex biological events. Research on antimicrobial resistance, rare genetic disorders, agriculture, and innovative solutions for sustainability vis-à-vis climate change is attracting collaborations and funding from across the globe, spanning both industry and academia—positioning BLiSC as a go-to hub for "biofutures". NCBS would like to acknowledge the strength we draw from our campus partners, whose collaboration enriches our scientific and institutional ecosystem.
As always, while we end the year reflecting on the past, we begin the new year with the hope that it will be the most important year of our lives, marked by unprecedented growth, new dimensions, and meaningful impact. Here are our wishes for the future.
We envisage NCBS, with its global excellence and the confidence and resources built over the past three decades, initiating a new discipline—Climate Change Biology—in partnership with other organisations within BLiSC, other centres of TIFR, and beyond. In this area, fundamental mechanisms of evolution and genetics, such as natural selection, adaptation, and epigenetics, would be studied on compressed timescales driven by rapidly changing environments. The outcomes may provide new ideas for alleviating challenges related to food, nutrition, health, and the environment. We also envision contributing to capacity building by capturing the imagination of young researchers and providing them opportunities to acquire skills for jobs that do not yet exist in practice and will be created by those very scholars.
Wishing you all, once again, a very Happy New Year.
L.S. Shashidhara
Centre Director