ICTS Joint Faculty (with NCBS) Shashi Thutupalli has been selected PI for one of four Infosys-TIFR ‘Leading Edge’ Grants across all TIFR centres. The team of co-PIs and collaborators includes Jimreeves David (postdoc at NCBS), Sandeep Krishna (NCBS) and Prasad Perlekar (TCIS-TIFR, Hyderabad). Thutupalli and his collaborators have proposed to bring together theory and experiment to elucidate the coupled roles of mechanics and chemistry in the growth dynamics of microbial populations on viscoelastic substrates.
The Infosys-TIFR ‘Leading Edge’ research grants fund interdisciplinary, bold, high-risk, high-reward research emerging from collaborations across disciplines. The goal is to provide the pilot funding for cutting-edge, relevant and rigorous research projects for a duration of up to 2.5 years, which can seed new lines of scientific enquiry, bear exceptional promise, drive breakthrough discoveries, and foster rich long-term collaborations within diverse disciplines of the TIFR community, including the main Colaba campus and all the TIFR centres.