Ganesan Venkatasubramanian

Ganesan Venkatasubramanian is an Indian psychiatrist and clinician-scientist who works as a professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore (NIMHANS). My overarching research interest is to learn the science that will facilitate a personalized approach to understanding disorders like Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder and treating them using state-of-the-art psychopharmacology as well as advanced neuromodulatory interventions like transcranial Electrical Stimulation & other interventions anchored on translational neurobiology. Venkatasubramanian is known for his studies in the fields of schizophrenia, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), brain imaging, neuroimmunology, neurometabolism and several other areas of biological psychiatry. 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, for his contributions to medical sciences in 2018. Besides, he is an adjunct faculty at the Centre for Brain Research (CBR) in Bangalore. Furthermore, he is a distinguished visiting professor at the Department of Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur.

Biography Ganesan Venkatasubramanian, born in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, graduated in medicine in 1998 from Stanley Medical College, completed his MD in Psychiatry in 2001 and PhD in Psychiatry (Schizophrenia) in 2013 from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS). He did his clinical research studies under Professor B. N. Gangadhar and Professor M. S. Keshavan at NIMHANS. Later, he worked in University of Sheffield at the SCANLab as a clinical research fellow for training in advanced brain imaging techniques under Sean Spence, who pioneered the brain scan lie detector. On his return to India in 2004, he joined NIMHANS as an assistant professor of psychiatry and holds the position of professor of psychiatry since 2016. At NIMHANS, he heads the Translational Psychiatry Laboratory (TransPsych Lab) as its principal investigator and hosts a number of researchers. He also serves as a consultant at the Schizophrenia Clinic and the Metabolic Clinic in Psychiatry of the institution.

Research and contributions Venkatasubramanian's research focus is in the fields of Schizophrenia, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), Brain imaging, Neuroimmunology, Neurometabolism, Clinical cognitive neuroscience and Psychopharmacology. He is known to have done extensive studies on evolutionary biology of human brain with respect to psychiatric disorders and exceptional skills and has published a number of articles, ResearchGate, an online repository of scientific articles has listed 371 of them. He is the Neuromodulation section editor of the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine and serves as the associate editor of Asian Journal of Psychiatry published by Elsevier. He is also a member of the Indian Psychiatric Society and co-chaired its Biological Psychiatry section during 2010–11. The research paper awards received by him include Best Postgraduate Research Paper Award of Indian Psychiatric Society conference – Karnataka (2000), Dr. D. S. Raju Award of the Indian Psychiatric Society conference in Madurai (2000), Best Original Research Paper Award of the German Journal of Psychiatry (2002), Dr. S. S. Jayaram Award Indian Psychiatric Society, South Zone conference (2002), Bombay Psychiatric Society Silver Jubilee Award of the Indian Psychiatric Society – Hyderabad conference (2003), Bhagwat Award of the Indian Psychiatric Society conference (2007), Marfatia Award of the Indian Psychiatric Society - Kolkata conference (2008), Poona Psychiatrists Association Award 2009 and Poona Psychiatrists Association Award 2011.

Venkatasubramanian received the Young Scientist Award at the 12th Biennial International Winter Workshop on Schizophrenia in Davos, Switzerland in 2004 and the Scopus Young Scientist Award for Medicine of Elsevier in 2006. He is a co-recipient of the Aristotle Award in 2010 and Dr. Vidyasagar Award of the Indian Council of Medical Research in 2013. He has also received the Tilak Venkoba Rao Oration Award by the Indian Psychiatric Society (2006), Professor M. Vaidyalingam Memorial Oration Award (2012) and the Best Poster Award at Neurobionics 2013 (Indo-German Workshop on Clinical Neurology).

Selected bibliography