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Prof. D. Narayana Rao receives honoured for his outstanding contributions to Physical Sciences

Prof. D. Narayana Rao, Pro Vice Chancellor, SRM University-AP, Amaravati has been conferred with the Fellowship of the Indian Science Congress (FISC) for his outstanding contributions to Physical Sciences.

The Fellowship has been awarded to Prof. Rao by the Indian Science Congress Association at their Council Meeting held in Bangalore on 16th October 2019.  The main objective of ISCA is to advance and promote the cause of Science in India, recognize and support excellence in scientific research, technologies and innovations. Prof. Rao’s outstanding achievements and sustainable significant contributions to sciences were recognised and honoured.

SRM University AP organized a felicitation ceremony for Prof. Rao on this occasion where he encouraged the professors to pursue research by stating its significance. The ceremony was chaired by Dr. D Gunasekaran (Registrar), Dr. B Sivakumar (Deputy Registrar), and Dr. Anil K Suresh (Associate Professor,  Biotechnology) who congratulated Prof. Rao on his achievements along with the faculty and staff members of the university.

Bennet Benny has been honoured with the opportunity to attend an internship under the supervision of Prof. Ryo Maezono at JAIST, Japan. Established in 1990, JAIST is one of the research-intensive institutes for post-graduate studies located in the centre of Ishikawa Science Park (ISP). The internship is funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), a government funding agency.

Under the guidance of Prof. Ranjit Thapa, Bennet had applied for the internship in March. This internship begins on 16th December and will continue till 24th December,2019. Bennet will be given hands-on tutorial on electronic structure calculations using DFT and QMC computational methods on one of the supercomputers located at JAIST. He will be joined by five other students from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia.

“I am very excited to be given this opportunity as it will provide me with excellent practical experience and ample exposure that will be helpful to build my career.”, says Bennet and further expresses his gratitude towards Prof. D Narayana Rao, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, SRM University AP, and Dr. Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics for their immense encouragement and guidance.

Cancer research to address future challenges in early diagnosis and treatments

Association of Biotechnology and Pharmacy recognized the pioneering research of Dr. Anil K. Suresh, Associate Professor, Department of Biotechnology, SRM University, AP by honoring him with the “Outstanding Researcher Gold Medal Award” on December 20th, 2019 at Vignan’s Foundation for Science, Technology & Research, Guntur. Dr. Anil’s revolutionary research encompasses nano-technology enabled smart nanobeads for cancer theranostic and clinical medicine. Through his research, he designs nanoparticles for timely diagnosis and targeted treatment of the otherwise terminal diseases to solve future challenges in biomedicine. The primary objective of one of his DBT funded research projects “Direct removal of multi-drug resistant cells out of blood” is aimed at cancer specific Ab-mediated direct removal of leukemia out of our blood using nanomagnets as an alternative to chemotherapy.

Mortality due to cancer has barely decreased in decades, despite an exponential increase in the development of efficient treatment processes. However, sub-groups of patients with a variety of tumor types including lung, bladder, and kidney have witnessed a dramatic curative success using immunotherapy. While such breakthroughs offer the hope of prolonged survival for some patients with advanced cancers, finding cancers at an early stage is a critical parameter that would substantially improve the chances of cure. The survival rates for patients with early diagnoses are five to ten times higher, accentuating the necessity of research targeting accurate diagnosis at an initial stage of cancer. Dr. Anil K Suresh along with his team researches to enable diagnosis and localized treatment of early stage invasive cancers (in some cases, pre-invasive states).

Dr. Anil recalls, “I was like any other researcher doing basic research on nanoscience and nanotechnology until I got an opportunity to work at Beckman Cancer Research Institute, where I often witnessed several cancer patients including young kids and women yelling in agony while undergoing chemo or radio therapy. Since then I became intensively stubborn, and am sincerely striving to the best of my abilities to diagnose and treat cancer, with an hope of giving cancer patients an human-friendly painless therapeutic option.
What inspires me the most is my fervor to eradicate suffering and my passion to cure! I personally believe that suffering in any form is painful, especially when a person is diseased with hard to cure life threatening diseases such as HIV, Diabetes, Cancer, etc. “

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