It takes a village ...

 “Young, very enthusiastic, naïve, slightly tense students arrived when it was pouring [rain] in 2006 ….  It was a tough task as a warden for me to think about their well being, to think about their welfare.  At the same time, the students had lots of expectations, lots of aspirations.  We had to meet their demands, their expectations, their standards.”

This is how my colleague Dr. Ramakrishna G. Bhat describes the incoming students of the very first batch at IISER Pune.

Students are the heart of our campus.  The image of the proverbial ``ivory tower” professor, fashionably buried in their own work with little time or concern for students is largely down-voted by faculty at IISER Pune.  It is a different matter that students can be a handful, meeting their expectations (especially non-academic!) can be a rough ride and we don’t always succeed, but then, who wants easy?

Ramakrishna Bhat was the first faculty member to join IISER Pune after the director, Professor K.N. Ganesh.  On joining, he was allotted the enormous task of setting up a hostel for the incoming 2006 batch.  This (temporary) hostel was to be created in a 30-year old abandoned building near NCL.  It was renovated at a feverish pace in about 15 days [1] and the first batch of our MS students walked into their residence in August 2006.  Ramakrishna and Professor G. Ambika (currently, dean of graduate studies) wholeheartedly threw themselves into the job of making these students feel at home.  They both stayed in the hostel for the first three and a half years. Be it holding tutorials in the dining hall (drawing chemical chain reactions on the menu board), handling frantic midnight requests to investigate stolen buckets or even waking up sleepy students for morning exams, they have done it all. 

Everything was all set to get even more chaotic with the admission of the 2007 and 2008 batches.  Sutirth Dey and Shouvik Datta joined the team of wardens and were responsible for the 2007 and 2008 batches respectively.  In order to accommodate the growing community of students, the institute was left with no option but to hire bungalows or apartments in the Baner and Pashan areas.  2008 was particularly tricky.   When Shouvik joined the Physics group in July 2008, he also took charge of the 2008 batch.  One of his earliest experiences was a crisis created by a last minute cancelation of living arrangements that had been planned for students.  A frenzied search yielded a bungalow (owned by Nana Patekar no less!) on Sus Road and some apartments in a building on the Baner Pashan Link Road.  Just a day or so before the students arrived, Shouvik went to check out these dwellings and found himself arranging beds in one of them along with the director! 

More colourful experiences were to follow. On Day 1, Shouvik had to go to all the buildings where students were staying and hire autorickshaws to get them to the dining hall located at NCL.  Gradually, he got used to regular phone calls at 1 am from security guards at these apartment complexes regarding noisy students.  Sometimes, he would personally have to visit to get stubborn students to climb off water tanks on the terrace (didn’t I say that our students are a handful?)  Another regular problem he would have to handle was when the other residents of these buildings would get annoyed and turn off water connections to the student apartments [2]. 

Soon, the chaos subsided.  A serious problem was about commuting between their apartments, academic buildings and dining hall.  This was resolved by hiring/purchasing an adequate number of buses.  The IISER bus network has served the community very well.  In an institute where the hostel(s), dining hall, classrooms and labs were far apart, these buses served as a lifeline.  They also provided a safe and convenient commute to our students if they wished to spend an evening in Pune main city. Until we became a fully residential campus, almost at any time of the day, two kinds of buses would be seen regularly on Dr. Homi Bhabha Road: buses from the National Defence Academy and from IISER.

Even after the most important logistical issues were taken care of, the “lighter” complaints were treated with utmost seriousness.  Once, when students complained that the chapatis in the dining hall were not as soft and round as what they had at home, the wardens held an emergency meeting with the purchase section to order roti makers!

In those years, a lot of energy also had to be expended towards “parenting the parents,” that is, allaying the apprehensions and fears of parents.  Their children were walking into uncharted territory: until 2011, it was not clear what they would be able to do with an IISER education.  Moreover, they had to drop their children off at buildings scattered all over Baner instead of a proper hostel.  In those days, the director and other leaders would regularly have long meetings with parents to assure them that their children were in safe hands.  Occasionally, there would be comical situations with the “don’t-you-know-who-I- am-my-kid-will-not-stay-here-one-more-minute” parents, but even they were tackled with tact and grace. 

Taking care of students is no joke.  On one hand, one has to implement hostel rules and oversee discipline issues.  On the other hand, one needs to be friends with them and guide them.  In the early years, the job got compounded because very few people had to take care of a large number of issues.  Two or three wardens would oversee a lot of things including hostel life, meals, transport, sports, recreation, discipline, health and mental wellbeing of students.  Loss of personal space, occasional frustration and overwhelm come with this territory.  Our leadership and the wardens took it in their stride, bade goodbye to personal egos and did their best.  It also helped that the administration was friendly, supportive and ready to work well beyond office hours [3].

This reminds me of an incident a few years ago: I was at a different institute then and had never visited IISER Pune.  One day, I wrote a somewhat helpless, somewhat miffed post about my wardenship duties there, whether I was any good at it and whether this job was of any use whatsoever.  A student from the 2007 batch at IISER Pune (who had graduated by the time my blog post appeared) wrote back a gentle rebuke and mentioned how hard his warden, Sutirth Dey, had worked for these students and how much of a lasting impact he had made on them!

As of today, our student hostels tower over the IISER campus.  When guardians arrive to drop off their freshmen wards, they encounter an elaborately built residential area with two tall buildings right next to a dining hall, a medical clinic with an ambulance on standby, a helpful hostel administration and decent security arrangements, not to mention a unified campus.  After students check in, they head towards our auditorium in the academic area for a welcome meeting with the dean of graduate studies, COSA (Committee of Student Activities: a team of seven faculty members who take care of student issues outside of the classroom), the dining committee members and our team of counselors.  We take great pride in conveying to these freshmen (and their parents) that there is a proper system to take care of every aspect of their life on campus.  The task of running this system is shared by a large number of people.  It is a reasonably decentralized, efficient system that gets better each year [4].  There are separate teams of people to look after different requirements so that no one person gets overwhelmed.  But, it took a lot of sweat and tears to raise this village that now raises the child!

On their part, the students have done every bit to deserve this and more [5].  There will be a future post on how proud they have made us.  Meanwhile, you may enjoy this blog with some awesome IISER alumni stories.




[1] The story of how the IISERs were visualized and started in a couple of months is a fascinating story (with enough thriller effect) narrated in this video by the planners themselves.  Important decisions were taken just days before the first session started and this meant that a lot of things were done at the last moment. 

[2] The tolerance of “housing societies” of Pune is world-famous. 

[3] After having visited or stayed at multiple institutes in India and after interacting with colleagues at many others, I realize that this is something to be truly grateful for!

[4] and many people in the admin office still work beyond office hours!

[5] though they are still a handful :)

Movers and Shapers - II

[The first past of the following post can be found here.]

Starting a new faculty position is no joke.  Books have been written on it, it is a hot topic on multiple blogs/websites (for example, see here and here) and many institutions conduct orientation programmes for new faculty.  You have become a PI with complete responsibility for your research group, you are on the other side of the class for the first time and you are performing a lot of laborious administrative tasks.  Joining a new institute where you will move labs/offices at least three or four times (either move from one building to another or readjust within the same building as new members join at high frequency) adds further layers of complications.  Even with the best of planning, things can go wrong.

For example, at IISER, through the “moving and shaping,” all sorts of difficulties came up.  There were delays in ordering material and in clearing customs.  Sometimes, enzymes thawed and were refrozen during transport: this caused unexpected results in experiments!  There were sudden pressures, for example, preparing a lab (practically overnight) for a new batch of students.  Sometimes, after a move, people would realize that the power requirements were much higher than anticipated.  Sometimes, there would be water shortage.  In a new building, there could be unforeseen damages due to heavy rainfall.  With many members sharing limited space, there would occasionally be differences and vocal exchange of views. 

All colleagues I spoke to acknowledged setbacks.  But, every single one of them also insisted that they do not retain any bitterness about it.  Many felt that their efforts towards meeting personal research goals created positive energy and this helped them to see difficult experiences as enriching.

M. Jayakannan from Chemistry (joined. 2007) mentions that by the summer of 2009, labs were sufficiently equipped for active research work at IISER.  The first few publications from work done at these labs started coming out by 2010 and since then, all the research groups in chemistry have been productive.  The early faculty hires were very active in publishing, averaging about 4 papers per group every year.  This gave confidence and healthy peer pressure to those who joined later.

My colleague Thomas Pucadyil joined the Biology group in 2010.  As of today, Thomas has a thriving research lab that includes 8 student members. Recently, a publication from his lab, “A high-throughput platform for real-time analysis of membrane fission reactions reveals dynamin function,” authored by Srishti Dar, Sukrut Kamerkar and Thomas Pucadyil has appeared in Nature Cell Biology. 

During a fun conversation over a cup of coffee, Srishti (the first author of this paper and one of Thomas’s earliest PhD students) and Thomas described how they set up the lab and the “assay system” leading to this publication.  For Thomas, the experience of starting his lab with students was full of surprises.  It  required multiple managerial skill sets, which he acquired on-the-go.  Early preparations for this work were started in Sai Trinity Building in 2011: this included visiting a goat market and slaughter house one early morning to acquire the brain of a goat.  They started off with an attempt to extract and isolate a specific protein from the goat brain.  While at Sai, they succeeded in it and knew that their project had passed the litmus test.  This motivated them to develop assays that would help to better streamline the role of this protein in facilitating cellular processes.  A detailed explanation of their work can be found here.

Thomas feels that the composition of his graduate-student-heavy lab played a crucial role in choosing and persisting with this project.  With postdocs, one tends to get results sooner, but postdocs are only present for a short stint.  On the other hand, graduate students are present for a much longer time and this gives you more room to experiment and set something up. In this case, their project took more than three years to develop and the results finally started coming together in 2014.  By this time, they had gone through two relocations, first to G1, a prefabricated lab building in the permanent campus in 2012 and the second, to the main building in 2014.  Their lab is now well settled with its core facilities in place and work done by his group has exceeded the expectations of the institute.

Thomas feels the strong camaraderie among the biologists helped him to move beyond the challenges and establish himself at IISER Pune.  Similar sentiments were expressed by others.  Girish Ratnaparkhi, one of the master planners behind the multiple relocations of the Biology group, mentions that when he joined, he felt energetic and very happy to help.  He remained very involved with the functionality of the department.  Be it preparing indents, supervising the packing and moving, receiving/hosting institute guests or organizing a conference, no work was shunned.  Everything was done in the spirit of service to the institute.

Talking to these colleagues made me wonder: can such an attitude of positivity and service to the institute be developed superficially? Or is it something that stems naturally from a deeper feeling of personal empowerment, which in turn comes from research productivity?

Movers and shapers - I

Last week, I got an opportunity to talk to some of my colleagues from Biology and Chemistry who joined between 2006 and 2008, that is, within the first two years of IISER.  The people I spoke to are H.N. Gopi, M. Jayakannan, Mayurika Lahiri and Girish Ratnaparkhi.  They shared some fascinating stories from these early days: stories of adjustment, setting things up, moving, expansion and readjustment.  This post and the next are based on their inputs. 

IISER started functioning from one floor of NCL Innovation Park in 2006.  Due to limited space, several faculty members shared what they call “hot desks” in the same office.  From 9 am to 6 pm, they designed curricula, taught classes (many for the first time), cleaned and prepared teaching labs themselves as there were no lab attendants, made purchase indents for lab equipment and held regular meetings to design their future labs/offices.  After dinner, many returned for a “second shift”, during which they corresponded with their collaborators or students from former work places, wrote papers and made grant applications [1].  The second shift could continue into the wee hours of the morning.

People could walk into our director Professor Ganesh’s office anytime they needed to [2].  Many a times, they would enter feeling worried, but would come out of the office with a big smile sharing his dreams about the future of IISER.

Professor Shashidhara (Shashi) walked from his place of residence in Panchwati to the permanent campus, Innovation Park and Sai Trinity Building every single day to oversee the progress at each point (and give things a good push whenever needed).  He patiently taught new faculty members from scratch how to work through administrative rules and regulations for acquiring equipment and setting up labs as many were fresh out of postdocs and were doing it all for the first time. 

When a potential faculty candidate visited for a job interview in those days, it was easy to get discouraged at the state of affairs: no research labs, no offices and no PhD students.  Apart from generous start-up grants, some of the things that attracted the early people to join were clear communication from the leadership about future plans, love of teaching and personal ambition.  The sense that they were building the institute and were equal contributors to every stage of development gave them a feeling of personal empowerment.  My colleague Mayurika mentions, “When I first visited for my job interview in 2007, I only saw the floor at Innovation Park and empty spaces in Sai Trinity building [3].   Shashi told me that things would be ready before I joined and I instinctively believed him.  Sure enough, things were ready by the time I joined in March 2008.  I did not feel any negativity around me. ” 

The central wing of the Sai Trinity building was inaugurated in January 2008 and was adequately ready for the biologists within a couple of months.

That was the time when experimental faculty had to spend maximum time in acquiring equipment for the labs. While doing this and allocating lab spaces, they decided upon a few healthy practices, which continue till date: first was the practice of shared labs.  Except a handful of cases where the nature of research is highly specialized, spacious common labs were to be shared by multiple members.  This not only reduced wastage of resources, but also taught faculty to treat resources as shared facilities rather than individual possessions.  As a colleague puts it jokingly, the tendency to act as “estate builder” was cut off right at the beginning.  Second was the practice of looking ahead: in any lab, some extra space was kept aside for future faculty.  When people ordered equipment and material for themselves, they ordered in extra quantities so that a new faculty would have enough workspace and resources to get started immediately upon joining.  This was very crucial because the Sai Trinity years witnessed a burst in hiring. 

In the meanwhile, the right side of the Sai Trinity building was acquired for chemistry and the chemists started moving there.  At one point of time, 11 faculty members and 40 students shared a lab space of 1800 square feet.

Around that time, Biology and Chemistry started looking for suitable PhD students.  The first advertisement for PhD went out from Chemistry in January 2008.  There would be at least three more rounds of advertisement and selection procedures before 4 students were selected in July 2008.  Biology also got their first few PhD students in August 2008.  These students took course work for a year and also actively helped with setting up the labs in Sai Trinity building.  By summer of 2009, the labs were well equipped and ready for active research.  Publications based on work done at IISER started coming out by 2010.

One of the reasons my early colleagues did not cave in to disappointment or exhaustion from frequent moves is that from the very beginning, no one lost sight of the final product, the permanent campus.  Gopi describes the happiness they felt while they witnessed the official land transfer of the permanent campus land to IISER in a ceremony at Pride Hotel in 2008: “We knew this informally, but were really thrilled when we saw it happening officially.”  Jayakannan mentions that even before all the moves across temporary locations happened, they started planning for the permanent campus.  Sometimes, they would wear construction hats and spend time at the construction sites.  “We adjusted to what was available with belief and sense of involvement in what was to come.  The institute always came first.”

But, Girish has a simpler explanation for the (more or less) high spirits: “Nothing big broke during the moves.  This kept everyone happy.”

[Stories of further moves and other groups coming up in future posts.  The second part of this post is here.]

[1] It would be a while before publications started coming out from work done at IISER. 

[2] We still can: it’s just that we don’t need to do so all that much anymore.  I only discovered the location of the director’s office last month, when a group met there to plan our 10 year celebrations.

[3] An office complex in the heart of Pashan, which was to remain our temporary campus for a long time.

Life begins at 10

Today morning, while working through some calculations done by a PhD student towards her project, I rewound 10 years ago to the end of 2005, when I was in the final year of PhD.  I had my task cut out that winter: start writing the first draft of thesis, prepare CV and research statement and apply to about a 100 places for postdoctoral positions.  As I carried package after package to the post office in the dreary winter (many places were still not accepting online applications), I speculated about where I would go next, next after the next and where in India could one apply.  I liked my grad school very much and hoped to eventually work at such an institution, one that is not just a (research) institute or a (teaching) university, but a combination of both [1].

At around the same time, the scientific advisory committee to the Prime Minister of India and the Ministry of Human Resource Development in India were taking concrete steps to lay the foundations of five such science institutes in India, namely the IISERs.  Two among these IISERs, IISER Kolkata and IISER Pune, started their academic programmes in August 2006 and are now in their tenth year.  Thanks, therefore, to a perfect combination of right opportunities and right timing, I am now based at IISER Pune, an institute that has given me everything I hoped for in a faculty position [2].

For a young institute, a decade is a good time to celebrate its accomplishments, reflect on future directions and engage with the larger public about its values, purposes, science and education.  My colleagues (especially the ones who joined in the very early years) have seen the development of our campus from a desolate, unused piece of land into a beautiful, fully residential campus, whose view they can enjoy every morning from their balconies with a cup of coffee.   

In a series of upcoming blog posts, I hope to document various important milestones in the growth of IISER Pune, memories of colleagues, alumni and current students from earlier years as well as  perspectives on where we are headed.  I will also update you about various programmes that we are organizing in the coming year to celebrate our tenth birthday.  Stay tuned.

[Update: the first post in the 10 year series can be found here]


[1] A place with mild winters would be an added bonus.
[2] This includes life in a city with not just mild winters, but also mild summers.