Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava

Infobox Scientist
name = Dr. G. P. S. Raghava


image_size = 200px
caption = Dr. G.P.S. Raghava

birth_place = Uttar Pradesh, India
residence = India
nationality = Indian
field = Bioinformatics
work_institution = Institute of Microbial Technology
Bioinformatics Center
doctoral_advisor =
doctoral_students =
religion = Hindu

Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava is a scientist and head of Bioinformatics center, Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH), Chandigarh, India (For detail visit his [http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/ Home Page] ).

Personal

Early years and Education

Raghava was born on 25th May 1963 in village Nagla Karan, Buland Shahr (UP), India. He did his B.Sc./M.Sc. from N.A.S. College, Meerut, UP in 1982. His major subjects were Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. He did his M.Sc in Physics with specialization in electronics from N.A.S. College, Meerut, UP in 1984. He did his M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), New Delhi in 1986. In 1996 he received his Doctrate degree from Institute of Microbial Technology and Panjab University, Chandigarh in area of Bioinformatics. His PhD work focuses on "Computer Aided Prediction of Protein Conformation from Amino Acid Sequences of Biotechnological Relevance" .

Carrier and Higher Studies

He joined Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh in 1986 as computer scientist. His primary duty was to develop/maintain computer software/hardware and IT infrastructure. He become head of bioinformatics center in 1994. He is also coordinator of distributed information centre (DIC) supported by DBT under BTISNET programme, where his primary duty is to built/maintain infrastructure required for protein modeling and engineering.

He worked as a Post Doctrate Fellow (PDF) at Oxford university as well as at European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) Cambridge, United Kingdom for two years (1996-98). During this period he learned and developed number of web servers in area of computational biology particularly in Protein Modelling.

Achievements and Awards

*Raghava got prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for 2008 (http://www.hindu.com/2008/09/28/stories/2008092859630900.htm)
*Raghava got National Bioscience Award of year 2005-6 for carrier development of Department of Biotechnology (Govt. of India) New Delhi
*BBSRC fellowship, funded by UK for postdoctoral studies at Oxford University, UK from 1996 to 1998. During this period I developed a number of web servers in the area of computational biology particularly in Protein Modelling.
*Government of Korea offered Visiting Professorship for six months (March 2004 to August 2004) to initiate Bioinformatics activities at Pohang University of Science and Technolgy (POSTECH).
*Invited by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), Little Rock, USA to establish Bioinformatics (http://bioinformatics.uams.edu/)
*Dr Raghava has published more than 90 research papers in reputed journals, developed 7 currated databases and more than 80 web servers, and 30 copyrights.
*Raghava was a key figure in the development of BioSuite software developed by TCS under NMITLI programmee, which was launched by Honable President of India Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, on 14th July 2004.
*His group in collaboration with private company Biomantra developed a software package VaxiPred: Computer aided vaccine design, which was launched by Director General, CSIR Dr R A Mashlekar on 15th of December 2004.

Distinguished Positions

*He was elected as Fellow of National Academy of Sciences by "The National Academy of Sciences, India" for his excellent contribution in the field of Bioinformatics.
*Dr. Raghava is listed as a hot 100 authors by BioMed Central for his contributions
*Dr Raghava has H-index 22 in May 2008 as per google scolar. H-index is used to measure performance of a researcher.
*Associate Editor of BMC Research Notes.
*Member of Editorial Board of Journal of Biomedical Science and Engineering.
*Associate Editor of Journal of Applied Sciences.
*Member of Editorial Advisory Board of journal Recent Patents on DNA & Gene Sequences

Research Interests

Accidently in 1991, he got interest in research and developed a method for calculating concentration of Antibody/Antigen from ELISA data. In initial phase he developed computer programs for general biological problems. In later stage he developed prediction method for protein secondary structure prediction; his methods successfully compete in international competitions like casp. In 1999 he establish his research group at IMTECH with emphasis on proteins structure prediction and genome annotation. In 2001, his group also focussed on "Computer aided vaccine design" with emphasis on subunit vaccine design. Since 2006, his group is trying to integrate bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, pharmacoinformatics, clinical informatics in order to develop single plate form for designing drugs in insilico.

Web Services and Software

He believes in public domain software or open source software/documents. Thus his group is using free software and building infrastructure for bioinformatics. All software and web servers developed at his group are free for academic use. Recently his group have initiated a web portal [http://crdd.osdd.net/ CRDD: Computational Resources for Drug Discovery] under [http://www.osdd.org/ OSDD] . Services provided from his group can be broadly classified in following categories.

Computer-aided Protein Structure Prediction

Functional Annotation of Proteins

External links

* [http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/about.html Raghava's Home Page]
* [http://bic.uams.edu/ Mirroring of servers ]
* [http://www.osdd.org Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) Foundation ]
* [http://www.osdd.net Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) Network ]
* [http://sysborgtb.osdd.net SysBorg TB Portal for Collaborative Research ]