Dr. Raghav Rajan, Assistant Professor in Biology at IISER Pune, has been selected for the Senior Fellowship awarded by the DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance for the year 2020-2021.

The Alliance, funded by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) of Government of India and Wellcome Trust of UK, supports research in health and biomedical sciences. As one of its activities, the Alliance grants Fellowships of a five-year duration in several categories such as Early Career, Intermediate and Senior. They are given in the domains of Clinical and Public Health Research and Basic Biomedical Research, and comes with a fellowship, and funds for research and travel to meetings.

Dr. Raghav Rajan, who has received the Senior Fellowship in the Basic Biomedical Research category, studies neural mechanisms in songbirds. His groups studies zebra finches as a model organism to understand the neural basis of complex natural behaviours that include a sequence of movements, and how they are triggered by a combination of internal and external stimuli. Dr. Rajan has also been a recipient of the DBT Ramalingaswami Fellowship.

Previous DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance Senior Fellowship holders from IISER Pune include Dr. Nagaraj B., Dr. M. S. Madhusudhan, Prof. S. G. Srivatsan, Prof. Thomas Pucadyil and Dr. Sunish Radhakrishnan.

We congratulate Dr. Rajan on this Fellowship and wish him success in the future!