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PUNE: Two Pune scientists are among 11 from across the country who will be honoured by the National Academy of Sciences (NASI) for their researches in physical sciences.

The academy initiated the NASI Young Scientist Awards last year to honour budding scientists below the age of 35.

Siddhartha Gadgil and Yogesh Joshi, the outstanding scientists from Pune, will be presented a medal and cash prize of Rs 25,000 each in end-November .

An assistant professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, Joshi has been researching on rheology. The kind of research he has done in the last few years involved understanding the physical behaviour of pasty materials like cosmetic and pharmaceutical creams, toothpaste and mayonnaise.

"The research was based on how the structure or morphology of these pasty materials evolve over a period of time. Predicting the change in the properties of these materials over a period of time becomes difficult," explains Joshi, assistant professor of chemical engineering at IIT, Kanpur.

Through his research, he developed a procedure called, Time-stress Superposition, which is based on identifying that stress affects the timescale of these pasty materials.

Joshi started his career at Pune's National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), where he did a PhD based on polymer processing. Then, his research guides were none other than Raghunath Mashelkar, former director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and Ashish Lele from NCL.

In 2006, Joshi bagged some of the most prestigious awards for young scientists from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) and a research award carrying Rs 10 lakh from the Department of Atomic Energy.

Quite an achievement for young scientists that India needs to cultivate in good numbers. "Thanks to government grants, scientific research is comfortably possible in India . We need science students who can pursue scientific researches of academic nature, especially in the field of energy," says Joshi, who also completed his post-doctoral thesis in rheology from the US, before moving to IIT, Kanpur.

Siddhartha Gadgil, whose areas of expertise are differential geometry and topology (or study of global properties), has tried to connect pure mathematics with biology. He is an associate professor at the department of mathematics at IISc, Bangalore.

For the last five-odd years, he has been researching on the application of topology to biology with regards to Ribo-Nucelic Acid (RNA).

Born in Pune and raised in Bangalore, Gadgil completed his Masters and PhD from the California Institute of Technology, USA. In the last stages of revision, his research will be very helpful, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. "Pure mathematics doesn't have any direct applications. But this research will, in the long-term , help better understanding of RNA folding patterns," says Gadgil.
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