Biography:

Professor Krishna Ganesh is the first Director of the newly established Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) at Pune. He obtained his Ph.D degrees from Delhi University (1977) and Cambridge University,UK (1980). He joined Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad in 1981 and moved to National Chemical Laboratory, Pune in 1987, where he was the Head of Organic Chemistry Division till July 2006. He has made creative contributions in the area of DNA and peptide therapeutics, in particular, design of potential therapeutic agents based on chemically modified DNA, PNA and modified collagen analogues. He has employed an imaginative combination of bioorganic and medicinal chemistry concepts along with synthetic organic chemistry and biophysics to address some of the challenging problems in DNA therapeutics. Recently he has been working on use of DNA as a template for creating nonfunctional assemblies. He has published 150 research papers and supervised 22 students for their doctoral degree. Prof Ganesh is a recipient of prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Chemical sciences for the year 1998, TWAS (Trieste, Italy) Prize in Chemical Sciences for 2005 and was awarded JC Bose Fellowship (2006) of Department of Science and Technology. He is a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences (Bangalore), Indian National Science Academy (Delhi), National Academy of Sciences (Allahabad) and Academy for Developing World Trieste (FTWAS). Professor Ganesh is also the secretary of Biomolecular Chemistry Division of International Union of Pure and applied Chemistry (IUPAC) since 2005 and is a member of the editorial Board of Chemistry, an Asian Journal published by Wiley Interscience.

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