K VijayRaghavan, 66: Calm in the Storm

Before he was Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, K VijayRaghavan, or KVR as he is known in academic circles, was founder and director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru. An award-winning geneticist and neurobiologist who worked on Drosophila flies, KVR was the silver-haired mentor who breathed life into what is now a premier research institution. At a time when a crisis of confidence had taken hold of the world, VijayRaghavan calmly held the reins of the country’s Covid-19 R&D taskforce, which he co-chairs, enabling vaccine and drug discovery and development on a war footing. The man shouldering the responsibility of India’s scientific response to Covid-19 has effortlessly switched gears through it all, attending parliamentary committee meetings and webinars with post-doctorates with equal ease, coordinating between academia and industry and fast-tracking approvals for drug testing, cham•pioning reforms in regulation of research and development, and proactively sharing information and insights on Twitter.

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