An Interview with Prof. Indira Ghosh, Dean,
School of Information Technology

interviewed by Bhoomika Meiling for JNU News

Bhoomika: First of all, on behalf of the JNU community, we welcome you to the JNU family.
Prof. Ghosh: Thank you. I've been welcomed literally by everyone I meet in JNU. It has not ceased even when I'm about to complete a year in SIT. It is nice to be welcomed by JNU News too.
Bhoomika: How are you finding JNU?
Prof. Ghosh: I joined in April, 2008 and found myself in a highly active and very wonderful place. The campus is absolutely beautiful. But I wish JNU was located somewhere else. Over the last few years Delhi has become more hot and humid (and of course green too). I am not used to such weather. My condition that I must get a house in the campus as soon as I join was duly fulfilled which has reduced my worries a lot. The administration has tried its best to make me feel comfortable here. Some of my research scholars from Pune University have also cracked the entrance and moved to JNU. As far as students are concerned, they are of almost the same intellectual level as my students in Pune. But so far I have noticed a big difference between my students here and in Pune. There the students were more academically oriented and their prime motive was a good placement in terms of job. They celebrate the smallest of achievements with great fervor in Pune University. It is not so here. Students seem to demand for everything here except good teaching which should be their first and foremost right. The academic orientation is somewhat lacking among them because of various reasons. Nevertheless they are a bright lot.
Bhoomika: What do you think are the best aspect of JNU?
Prof. Ghosh: Faculty gets adequate funds to start their careers here. Authorities are wiser. They are very adjusting and I think they always encourage the faculty to give their best to the university by providing a good starting infrastructure. Also the academic flexibility I see here is absolutely wonderful. The idea of inter-disciplinarity makes JNU unique. Recently I saw it in the Science Fest. The academic friendship between the faculty members here is amazingly strong. They have an inborn curiosity about each others' research work. In fact I am already looking forward to my collaboration with other schools of interest.
Bhoomika: Tell us something about your life before coming to JNU.

Prof. Ghosh: I did my M.Sc in Physics from Calcutta University and then Ph.D from IISc, Bangalore in Molecular Biophysics. After that I proceeded for further research to University of Huston as a Fulbright Scholar, later to Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. On coming back, I joined the CSIR pool in Saha Institute, Calcutta, and then joined as Scientist at IICB, A CSIR institute in Jadavpur to fecilitate the computational interface between Chemists and Biologists. In 1990 I had to make a decision of joining industry at Bangalore due to my family commitment and this was a turning point in my career life. I joined a private pharmaceutical company called Astrazeneca which was dedicated to making anti-malaria and anti-TB drugs. I took that shift from academics to corporate sector as a challenge and stayed on for thirteen years which has provided me an opportunity of learning team management, focused research and timeline delivery. The most crucial lesson I learnt was "what not to do". This successful inning has not only enriched my CV with papers, patents and copyrights but has also given me a chance of working with the international pharmaceutical scientists and gaining the knowledge about "Tricks of Drug designing".
I had always aspired to contribute meaningfully to society. By the time my daughter finished her MBBS, I had come to the realization that after a point, private sector values you entirely because of your acquired management skills rather than your craving for research. Around that time, in 2001, I got a very lucrative and much sought after offer from Germany. However, things were changing too fast after 9/11 in the U.S. and I finally dropped the idea of going to Germany. By 2000, genome research had come up in India in a big way. I could feel a strong impulse to go back to academics after a 13-year-long tryst with the private sector. In 2003, I resigned from my lucrative and high status job to join Pune University. Fortunately I had many publications which made my return to academics easier. It was a big shock for a lot of my friends that I was leaving such a high profile job for what they saw as peanuts. They could not appreciate and will never understand my love for research and teaching, which has increased spirally since last five years.
In Pune the Institute of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology had just started. I joined as professor in that institute. The institute permitted me to train students in all the areas. I taught many subjects at the same time. I even taught in their Management School! Students were thrilled in my classes. I also guided some M.Phil dissertations. The orientation of the students towards private industry changed once I started teaching there. They used to look upon such endeavors with a high degree of cynicism. For them industry was not intellectual enough. But now they had a teacher who talked science in the language of management. My realization is that industry and academics are not two opposite ends but complementary to each other- a balanced society need both of them.
At the same time, I also learnt a lot from my students. I can share two things that I learnt from my students. First is that those who are good and smart orators and seemingly very efficient, may not be productive at all when it comes to real work. The second thing is that the best leader/ teacher will be the one who can convert bad material into better material. I had always believed in this but in Pune, where I was also on an administrative post, it crystallized into concrete steps. I made it a point that every teacher in the Institute takes under her/him an equal number of good students, average students and poor students for mentoring through projects. What is so special about always taking good students and thus, producing good research? What do you contribute as a teacher in such a process?
Your prowess as a good teacher is proved only when you are able to produce good results with a poor student! I faced a lot of criticism for making this happen, but I stuck to it and we even evolved a comparatively objective methodology of assigning students to teachers. The system delivered good results.

As you must have gathered from all this, as a person who believes in certain principles, I have always worked under a lot of pressure both from home and organization. But my knowledge of the industry has always added to my academic experience. People thought that I was going backwards in my career but it is not so. I saw considerable success in Pune. I started a course on Clinical Research through public-private collaboration. The infrastructure & syllabus for this course was provided by Pune University and the faculty for the course comprised of people working for private industries. It was very fruitful and worthwhile to create human resources for the sunlight industry like clinical and translational research. At the same time it was very practical too. Earlier, this training was given to clinical employees when they joined companies. Now companies get readymade candidates! Presently, six centers are running this course across India providing more than 1000 professionals - it helped young people to get jobs. I would be happy if it could be launched in JNU too.

Another project that I did in Pune was the launching of the Bioinformatics Certificate Exam (BINC) to evaluate students' knowledge of Bioinformatics. Actually, it was observed that students were simply enrolling for courses and research in Bioinformatics without any standard knowledge of the subject. BINC is the standard exam that evaluates the knowledge of a student aspiring for research in Bioinformatics. It is something like GATE . I got it started through online registration with the support of DBT, Govt. of India. Now the ball is rolling. Initially we had abysmal results. Very few candidates could qualify it. But now more and more students are qualifying the exam. Many from JNU also have cracked it this year.
Bhoomika: What are the things that inspire you to swim against the current?
Prof. Ghosh: Since childhood I have been told repeatedly what I should not do and it is still continuing, so to survive I learnt to swim against the trend. My teachers at school, university and research and my ideals like S. Radhakrishnan and Tagore have inspired me and made it an enjoyable journey. I love to read their books. I owe a lot to the Physical Education teacher in my school who taught me to break my shackles. One of my college teachers taught me the valuable trick for success- never shy away from that which you do not know, try to learn it. Of course, Prof. G. N. Ramachandran of IISc Bangalore is truly my ideal. Thanks to the teachings of all these people, my success has overgrown my mediocrity. I have always looked for solution to every problem. I was known as No Problem Woman (NPW) in the company. I have tried to find the solution whenever a problem sprang up. I never looked for the person who created the problem as I thought that it was just a waste of time.

Bhoomika: What are your areas of research?
Prof. Ghosh: I have been intrigued by the subtleness of biology, very small and critical differences cause large changes in biology. Most of my research has been around developing methodology to understand different interactions at the molecular level . My thesis was the first attempt to understand the stereo-selectivity in enzyme using theoretical method which later integrated in a technique called docking. Applying statistical thermodynamics in the understanding of preferential binding of ligand to receptor was another research field developed by us. My recent interest has been to deal with diseases like Malaria, Tuberculosis and diabetes. Currently I am busy in finding the cause and remedy of these diseases using the enormous experimental information available like genomics, proteomics and metabolomics.
Bhoomika: What are your hobbies?
Prof. Ghosh: Books and music. I listen to Classical music. I specially love North Indian vocal, Ghazals, Ravindra Sangeet, Hindi film music and some English pop too. I don't have much taste for rock music though I like Bruce Springsteen's-Born In the U.S.A. M.S. Subbalakshmi is my favourite in South Indian whereas, Amir Khan and Pt. Bhimsen Joshi in North Indian classical. I love diversity. I love reading all sorts of books. I enjoy everything .I particularly love reading drama. Ibsen and Tagore are my favorites. I read extensively in English, Hindi and Bangla. Books give a direction to one's life. I recently read a book that my daughter gave me, The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. It was unassumingly great. It talked about taking responsibility for one's conscious as well as unconscious acts.
Bhoomika: Would you like to give a message to the JNU students?
Prof. Ghosh: Yes, always ask questions and seek for the answers. Don't accept anything just because it was told to you.