Srijit Seal at the Institute for Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology.
PhD student Srijit Seal has recently completed a month-long outreach trip to India, where he presented his work on artificial Intelligence in drug discovery to a number of universities and research institutes.
Reaching new talent
Srijit is a third year PhD student in Professor Andreas Bender's theoretical chemistry group and a former MCR president at Clare Hall. He says the main reason for the tour was to meet and encourage undergraduate and Masters students in India to apply for PhD/MPhil programs in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and Clare Hall. He explains: "Many students expressed an interest in pursuing higher education and asked me many tough questions - I was able to answer most of their queries on the application procedures and funding possibilities. Next year, I hope to see many of them in Cambridge!"
The visit had additional benefits for Srijit. He says: “I was grateful to visit many places in India to learn about their research and to talk about science with many eminent professors there. This also opened up many collaboration possibilities…I am already excited to be working on one of them.”
Srijit's visit was partially funded by the Clare Hall Progression fund and the Tutor’s Research Award fund. His own PhD is funded by a Cambridge International Scholarship from the Cambridge Trust, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund and a Trinity Henry Barlow Scholarship from Trinity College.
The tour
Srijit was invited to speak about the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, the Bose Institute, the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER Kolkata), and Jadavpur University. The Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, invited Srijit to speak to the new batch of pharmaceutical science MTech students.
Srijit talks at Shiv Nadar University.
In Delhi, Srijit spoke at Shiv Nadar University (above) about machine learning implications in drug discovery, as well as at St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, about applying for PhD and master's programs in Cambridge.
Srijit presents at the Indian Institute of Science.
In addition, Srijit discussed his paper about mitochondrial toxicity predictions and how machine learning could apply to Cell Painting data to discover new drugs at the Indian Institute of Science and the Institute for Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology in Bangalore.
Srijit presents his research at the Institute for Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology.
Further, Jubilant Biosys Limited, a Bangalore-based company providing innovative drug discovery services to the global life sciences industry, invited Srijit to present at their research hub. He will present his work virtually at Tata Consultancy Services Innovation labs in Chennai and Syngene International in Bangalore next month.