Prof. Satyajit Mayor, Director, National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (inStem), has been elected a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
An election to NAS is recognition of a scientist's distinguished and continuing achievements in research. With this announcement, Prof. Mayor joins the list of other illustrious NAS fellows from NCBS, former director of NCBS, late Prof. Obaid Siddiqi, former director and current DBT Secretary Prof. K. VijayRaghavan.
"Satyajit Mayor's election to the US National Academy of Sciences is recognition of the extraordinary science that has come from his lab over the past couple of decades. His superb science has defined new directions in cell- biology and has been combined with leading an awesome team of imaging-scientists and technologists to make the National Centre for Biological Sciences one of the best places for microscopy research and training in the world. His passionate leadership as Director of NCBS and inStem has created a vibrant Bangalore BioCluster that everyone was once sceptical about and now people all over India and the world want to emulate. The US National Science Academy is very lucky to have him in the club. I am sure we will hear a lot more about Jitu's science and scientific-leadership in the coming years. India should also be proud of the election of Manindra Agarwal of IIT/Kanpur, one of our best mathematician-computer scientists." saysProf K. VijayRaghavan.
Prof Mayor's research uses multi-disciplinary approach combining cell biology with physics and chemistry to understand the molecular mechanisms of endocytosis in metazoan cells and to study this phenomenon at many scales. At the molecular scale his group aims to uncover the molecular players in endocytic processes; at the mesoscopic scale research in his laboratory attempts to provide a physical description of cell membrane structure and organization process and its material properties; at the cellular scale the work is aimed at synthesising a role for endocytosis in cellular signalling and cell surface homeostasis; at the scale of the tissue the group wishes to determine how control of endocytosis impinges on many developmental programs in tissue morphogenesis.
Professor Ronald Vale, University of California San Francisco (UCSF),USA, Howard Hughes MedicaI Investigator and Vice-Chair of the Departmentof Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, says, "Mayor has changed our view of the plasma membrane, the lipid-containing barrier that separate the inside of the cell from the exterior environment. He has pioneered new techniques that reveal an intriguing nanoscale organization of molecules in the plasma membrane and has discovered that this organization arises both from lipids as well as a cytoskeletal network of filaments that is actively reshaping the membrane. Mayor's work has important implication on how signals are transmitted from the outside of the cell to its interior, which has important implication on understanding various types of human disease."
Prof Mayor is also the recipient of several national and international awards such as the Wellcome Trust International Senior Research Fellowship, Swarnajayanti Fellowship, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award and the JC Bose Fellowship and Infosys Prize for Life Sciences (2012) and elected EMBO Fellow in 2013.
"Surprised but very happy to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. It is indeed an honour. Of course this is acknowledgement of our collective work and not just mine. It is a recognition of the members of my laboratory past and present, and my close collaborators Madan, and Ram (Vishwakarma). I could not have achieved this without the involvement of all of these wonderful people. This is a recognition of what we have been able to do at NCBS and the tremendous facilities we have for the work we do." reacts Prof. Mayor.
Links to Mayor Lab:
Mayor Lab : https://www.ncbs.res.in/mayor
Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyajit_Mayor
About NAS announcement:
NAS website: http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/april-28-2015-NAS-Elec...
