Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava

Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava is an Indian bio-informatician and head of the Bioinformatics Centre at the Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH).

Personal

Early years and education

Raghava was born in village Nagla Karan, Buland Shahr (UP), India in 1963. He did his BSc/MSc from N.A.S. College, Meerut, UP in 1982. His major subjects were Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. He did his MSc in Physics with specialisation in electronics from N.A.S. College, Meerut, UP in 1984. He did his MTech from Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), New Delhi in 1986. In 1996 he received a doctorate in bioinformatics from Institute of Microbial Technology and Panjab University, Chandigarh. His thesis was on "Computer Aided Prediction of Protein Conformation from Amino Acid Sequences of Biotechnological Relevance".

Career and higher studies

Raghava joined the Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh in 1986 as a computer scientist and developer. He became head of the Bioinformatics Centre in 1994. He is also coordinator of the distributed information centre supported by DBT under the BTISNET programme, where his primary duty is to build and maintain infrastructure required for protein modelling and engineering.

He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford university as well as at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Cambridge for two years (1996–98). During this period he learned and developed a number of web servers for application in computational biology, particularly in protein modelling.

Achievements and awards

Raghava receiving Young Leader Award from President of India, Pranab Mukherjee

G P S Raghava receiving India Research Front Award 2009

G P S Raghava receiving S. S. Bhatnagar Award from prime minister Manmohan Singh

G P S Raghava receiving National Bioscience Award from Science and Technology minister Shri Kapil Sibal

• G P S Raghava received the Young Leader Award in Science & Technology, Lakshmipat Singhania – Indian Institute of Management Lucknow National Leadership awards 2011 ^[1]
• He is listed among The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds by Thomson Reuters.^[2]
• He got J.C. Bose National Fellowship for the year 2010, constituted by Department of Science and Technology.
• NASI-Reliance Industries Platinum Jubilee Awards, 2009 in Biological Sciences^[3]
• Thomson Reuters Research Excellence ~ India Research Front Awards 2009 ^[4]
• Raghava received the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for 2008^[5]
• Raghava got the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology (Govt. of India) New Delhi (2006).
• BBSRC fellowship, funded by UK for postdoctoral studies at Oxford University, UK from 1996 to 1998. During this period he 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 Technology.
• Invited by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS, Little Rock, USA) to establish ^[6]
• Raghava has published more than 150 research papers in reputed journals, developed 15 curated databases and more than 150 web servers, and 70 copyrights.
• Raghava was a key figure in the development of the BioSuite software developed by TCS under NMITLI programme, launched on 14 July 2004.
• His group in collaboration with Biomantra, a private company, developed a software package VaxiPred: Computer aided vaccine design, which was launched by Director General, CSIR Dr R A Mashlekar on 15 December 2004.

Positions

• Raghava ranked 30th among world-wide bioinformatics heads and 1st in Indian bioinformatics heads according to site Bioinformatics Lab Registry
• 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.
• He was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Banglore for his excellent contribution in the field of Bioinformatics.
• Raghava is listed as a hot 100 authors by BioMed Central for his contributions
• Dr Raghava has H-index 38 and I10-index 76 in February 2013 as his Google scholar profile. H-index is used to measure performance of a researcher.
• Associate Editor of BMC Research Notes.
• Associate Editor of BMC Bioinformatics.
• 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
• Member of Editorial Advisory Board of journal The Open Bioinformatics Journal

Research interests

Raghava developed a method for calculating concentration of antibodies and antigens from ELISA data, and he a prediction method for protein secondary structure prediction. In 1999 he established his research group at IMTECH with emphasis on protein structure prediction and genome annotation. In 2001, his group also focused on "Computer aided vaccine design" with emphasis on subunit vaccine design. Since 2006, his group is trying to integrate bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, pharmaco-informatics and clinical informatics in order to develop a single plate form for designing drugs in silico.

Web services and software

Raghava is an adherent of public domain software or open source software, and his group both uses and develops free software for academic use. Recently his group have initiated a web portal Computational Resource for Drug Discovery (CRDD) under Open Source Drug Discovery. Services provided from his group can be broadly classified in the following categories.

Works

• OSDDlinux A customize linux operating system for drug discovery
• GlycoEP : In silico Platform for Prediction of N-, O- and C-Glycosites in Eukaryotic Protein Sequences. PLoS ONE 8(6): e67008
• Lbtope: Improved Method for Linear B-Cell Epitope Prediction Using Antigen’s Primary Sequence. PLoS ONE 8(5): e62216
• Open Source Software and Web Services for Designing Therapeutic Molecule
• Freeware in Science A google plus community on Freeware in the field of Science.
• HIVcoPred: A server for prediction of HIV coreceptor usage (CCR5).
• TumorHPD: Computational approach for designing tumor homing peptides. Scientific Reports 3: 1607
• CellPPD: In silico approaches for designing highly effective cell penetrating peptides. Journal of Translational Medicine 2013, 11:74 .
• MDRIpred : A web server for predicting inhibitors against drug tolerant M. Tuberculosis, published in Chemistry Central Journal
• CancerDR: Cancer Drug Resistance Database. Scientific Reports 3, 1445
• CSIR-Informatics Portal: Web Servers and software developed by CSIR, INDIA
• ToxinPred: In Silico Approach for Predicting Toxicity of Peptides and Proteins.

References

External links

• Official website
• ResearchGate Profile