Sci-ROI Connect
Volume 7 | February 20, 2021
Sci-ROI initiative
We are excited to introduce our new and bigger team of volunteers for 2021. It comprises of Alap Kshirsagar, Anant Jain, Ananya Mukherjee, Arkadipta Bakshi, Atul Gopal, Avijit Banik, Jay Gandhi, Kanika Khanna, Madhumati Sevvana, Manali Ghosh, Prakriti Kalra, Rohit Vaidya, Somnath Biswas, Souvik Das, Stuti Chakraborty and Subhadeep Dutta. The team is a mix of undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral scholars, who come from diverse disciplines ranging from engineering, physics, chemical biology and life sciences among others. We are excited to start working and plan to bring out a round the year initiatives in addition to Sci-ROI's annual event. Stay connected to learn more.

With the new team in place, Sci-ROI expands it's social media presence beyond FB, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube! We are now on Instagram. Connect with us @sci_roi and we will keep you updated on a series of initiatives we have planned for around the year to accelerate your plan of transition. We will be posting on new career opportunities in India and also releasing highlights of our upcoming interviews and blogs from the STEM professionals transitioned to Indian industry and academics in recent times. If you have any interesting ideas where you think Sci-ROI can venture into in the future, please feel free to dm us.

Finally, don't forget to follow!
Volunteer's Corner
TAPOJYOTI
I am a medical graduate from Kolkata, currently working towards my Ph.D. at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City in the field of structural biology and biophysics of protein-membrane interactions. I work with a class of proteins that do not form stable structures, known as intrinsically disordered proteins. My research is related to the structure and function of such a protein that causes Parkinson’s disease. I use NMR spectroscopy, fluorescence, and other biophysical methods to address my research questions.
 
As a Khorana Scholar, I was aware of the mission and activities of Sci-ROI since its inception, because both programs grew out of the sister organization WINstep Forward. I attended the Sci-ROI Annual Meeting 2018 where I was fascinated to see the vast number of participants from all walks of science who were eager to move back to India or otherwise wanted to keep up with the rapidly evolving academic, industrial and entrepreneurial landscape in India. I was enthralled by the opportunity to interact with key scientific leadership from India and share my thoughts on developing an ecosystem of physician-scientist training and retention in India.
 
I am excited to be part of the amazing team of Sci-ROI organizing members for the last two years that represent two contrasting pictures of the entire world wrecked by the Covid-19 pandemic. Faced with hard choices, we made a promise to make the 2020 Annual Event a completely online experience. None of us had any experience of organizing an online event of this scale so far, and that inexperience coupled with a collective zeal apparently worked in our favor. We did weeks of brainstorming about every small detail that could possibly go wrong, and eventually we exceeded our expectations and reached further than we could have ever reached via an in-person meeting. While during the 2019 Annual Meeting I was mainly seen behind the camera doing live-streaming and recording the conference, this year I was involved with planning and organizing the Annual Meeting, inviting guest speakers and recording their talks, co-moderating the live panel on new faculty perspectives, some back-end work on the website, and organizing and moderating the virtual recruitment week. Above all, working with Sci-ROI has been a personally enriching journey for me in terms of communication and leadership skills, teamwork and professionalism, and has built lasting relations with like-minded people.
 
To know more about Tapo click here.
Current Job Opportunities in India
Sci-ROI's job portal is dedicated for helping researchers and Ph.D. scholars accessing job opportunities in India. These job listings are targeted towards research, industry and entrepreneurship that may be of interest to the STEM community. Checkout some new additions to our Job Portal.
Current Affairs
A recent pre-recorded webinar on Professionalism, Role Models/ Mentors and Careers in Facility Management in India

The scientific ecosystem in India is ever-expanding, and more opportunities than ever are present today for those who wish to build their careers in science. This new series of webinars by IndiaBioscience will discuss several such career paths as well as provide the requisite knowledge, tools and techniques for science graduates to navigate and craft their career paths.
European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) joined hands to launch the India EMBO Lecture Courses, under which up to six lecture courses covering life sciences will be funded per year in India.

The aim of a lecture course is to teach participants, primarily PhD students and postdoctoral researchers with background and underlying concepts, thereby making the topic accessible to scientists with diverse scientific background.

Current round deadline: 1 March 2021
Four young women awarded Women Excellence Award 2021 in...

New Delhi, Four young women fellows of Indian National Science Academy have been awarded the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) Women Excellence Award 2021 in the national capital for excelling in science and engineering on the...

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www.businessinsider.in
Meet 7 Indian women scientists whose inventions and...

Women in science from being a minority are now occupying the most important positions, in realms one thought were unachievable before. From winning Nobel Prizes to heading NASA, women scientists have etched their names in history. In India,...

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yourstory.com
Protein behind less spread of coronavirus variant in...

Deficiency of a lung-protecting protein in the Caucasian population may have made Europe and North America more susceptible to the spread of a coronavirus variant as compared to Asia, suggests a study by Indian scientists which also reveals how...

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www.hindustantimes.com
Covaxin and Covishield: What we know about India's Covid ...

Less than a week after launching the world's largest inoculation drive, India has shipped tens of thousands of free doses of Covid-19 vaccines to neighbouring countries in what is being widely described as "vaccine diplomacy". India's drug...

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www.bbc.com
Indigenous COVID-19 vaccine by Bharat Biotech, Covaxin has led to the tolerable safety outcomes and enhanced immune responses in a double-blind, randomized, phase-1 trial.

Covaxin, the commercial name of BBV152, is a whole-virion inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine formulated with a toll-like receptor 7/8 agonist molecule. It was tested in healthy adult volunteers aged 18-55 years, at 11 hospitals across nine states of India. Read more
Sci-ROI 2021 Sponsor
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