Balasubramanian Gopal

Balasubramanian Gopal (born 1970) is an Indian structural biologist, molecular biophysicist and a professor at the Molecular Biophysics Unit of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his studies on cell wall synthesis in Staphylococcus aureus and is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. He received the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology in 2010. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2015, for his contributions to biological sciences.

Biography Balasubramnian Gopal, born on 31 August 1970, completed his master's degree at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and started his career as a biochemist by joining Torrent Pharmaceuticals at their Ahmedabad station. Later, he took a break from his job and joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) from where he secured a PhD. Moving to the UK, he did his post-doctoral studies in crystallography at the National Institute for Medical Research. Returning to India, he joined the Molecular Biophysics Unit of IISc as a member of Lab 301 where he and his colleagues are engaged in researches on structural and mechanistic aspects of membrane-associated proteins involved in inter-cell communication, transcriptional regulation and mediate antimicrobial resistance.

Gopal is known to have done considerable research in molecular biophysics and has contributed to widening our understanding of the cell wall synthesis in Staphylococcus aureus, a common gram-positive bacterium found in human respiratory tract and skin. He has published his research findings as articles in peer-reviewed journals and Google Scholar, an online article repository has listed 77 of them. He has delivered keynote addresses at several seminars including the Graduate Students' Meet 2007 and the 2nd International Conference on Structural and Functional Genomics organised by Sastra university, Tanjore in August 2016.

Awards and honors In 2025, he was awarded the Tata Transformation Prize in the Sustainability category. Department of Biotechnology awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development in 2010. The elected fellowship of the Indian National Science Academy reached him in 2016.

Selected bibliography