Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee
I am this lab's principal investigator.
I did my undergraduation in Industrial Biotechnology from the Centre for Biotechnology, Anna University, 2005. Following a one-year stint as an Inlaks Foundation visiting scientist in Nick Luscombe's lab (then) at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, I continued my work as a PhD student in the same lab, under the aegis of the Faculty of Biology at the University of Cambridge and the International PhD Programme at EMBL. My PhD thesis has (what I think is) a self-explanatory title: "A computational study of bacterial gene regulation and adaptation on a genomic scale". Following a short bridging post-doctoral stint (rather un-adventurously in the same lab), I moved back to India - to NCBS, Bangalore - to establish a wet (experimental, in every sense of the word) / computational research lab investigating bacterial gene regulation and adaptation on a genomic scale.
My work in Cambridge was funded over the years by The Tucker Price Research Fellowhip at Girton College, Cambridge; The St. John's College Research Scholarship, Cambridge; The Developing World Education Fund and Dharam Hinduja Scholarship, Cambridge; University of Cambridge ORS award (now defunct); EMBL; The Inlaks Foundation; and BBSRC (through a grant awarded to Nick and Gillian Fraser, our collaborator).
I currently hold a Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship, which funds our research. I also held the Ramanujan Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India till recently. I receive core funding from NCBS-TIFR, our host institute. Extramural students are currently funded by PhD studentships at TIFR, Junior Research Fellowships from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Department of Biotechnology.
Outside science, I am a husband, and the father of two. I enjoy singing classical music and painting with water colours. I read all sorts of books and magazines and maintain my own little library of odd books.