Narayanaswamy Srinivasan

Narayanaswamy Srinivasan (born 1962) was an Indian molecular biophysicist and a professor and the head of Proteins: Structure, Function and Evolutionary Group (N. S. Group) at the Molecular Biophysics Unit of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his researches in the fields of computational genomics and protein structure analysis. An elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, India, he is a J. C. Bose National fellow of the Department of Biotechnology and a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Science and Technology. 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 2007, for his contributions to biological sciences.

Biography N. Srinivasan, born on the April Fool's Day of 1962 in Chennai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, graduated in physics from the University of Madras in 1982 and continued at the university to complete his master's degree in biophysics at the Department of Crystallography and Biophysics in 1984. Joining the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), he secured a PhD in 1991 for his thesis, Conformational studies on globular proteins: Data analysis, and served as a senior research fellow at IISc, assisting Padmanabhan Balaram, a noted biochemist and Padma Bhushan recipient. His stint at Balaram's laboratory lasted only 10 months and in October 1991, he moved to the Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College to work with Tom Blundell and stayed there till 1994 when he shifted his base to Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research where he had the opportunity to work under Mike Waterfield. Two years later, he was reunited with Tom Blundell at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Cambridge and completed his post-doctoral studies there in May 1998. In 2010, he was promoted as a professor and he heads the Proteins : Structure, Function and Evolutionary Group, popularly known as N. S. Group, of the MBU. Deploying computational genomics, he is known to have assisted in identifying similar proteins with shared structural and functional features. His research findings have been published in several articles; online article repositories such as Google Scholar and ResearchGate have listed 345 and 391 of his articles respectively. He has been granted patents for two of his inventions related to nucleotide sequences. His ongoing project, Multi-macromolecular assemblies, relates to 3-D structures of large macromolecular machines.

Srinivasan is a former member of the committee on Affiliates and Special Interests Group of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and a member of the Structural Biology and Structural Genomics section of the Faculty of 1000. He was associated with PRIB 2007, an international conference on Pattern Recognition In Bioinformatics, held in Singapore in 2007 as a member of the program committee and has delivered several featured lectures and keynote addresses which included the Keystone Symposium on Multiprotein Complexes (Cambridge 2006), and Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (Melbourne 2012). On the academic front, he has served as the thesis examiner for a number of Indian universities and as the coordinator of integrated doctoral and BS programs in Biology of Indian Institute of Science.

Awards and honors The Department of Biotechnology of India awarded Srinivasan the National Bioscience Award for Career Development in 2004.

Selected bibliography

Patents