This is the seventeenth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 27-28 October, 2023. Debasisa Mohanty is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by India.
I am a Computational Biophysicist. I joined National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi, India after my education and training at IIT (Kanpur), IISc (Bangalore), Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, USA) in 1998.
For the past 25 years, I have led the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology research group at NII, New Delhi as faculty and Group Leader and have ensured that data driven research in host-pathogen interactions and disease biology plays a significant role in various research programs of NII. In August 2022 I took over as the Director of the National Institute of Immunology (NII), which is one of the leading national research laboratories of the Govt. of India in the area of immunology and biomedical sciences.
My research uses data driven in silico approaches to address complex problems in human disease and immunity. We work on deciphering evolutionary features of biomolecular systems by developing structural bioinformatics and atomistic simulation methods to investigate host-pathogen interactions and disease biology. These approaches have helped us to gain insights into metabolic, signaling and regulatory networks in biological systems. The innovative data driven computational methods developed by my group have successfully addressed several biologically relevant questions in the broader areas of host-pathogen interactions and disease biology, with specific emphasis on drug target identification and drug discovery for tuberculosis, malaria and SARS-CoV-2 and have resulted in more than 75 publications in leading international journals. I have been elected as a fellow of all three science academies of India.
Going beyond research, I also play a leading role in various national projects on data analysis/visualization, data management and formulation of policy for making data available as per FAIR guidelines. I chair the Technical Expert Committee of Department of Biotechnology (DBT), India on Theoretical & Computational Biology (Bioinformatics, AI & Big Data), which has been promoting data driven research in Biotechnology in India. I am also serving as member in the scientific advisory committee of Indian National SARS-CoV-2 Genome Sequencing Consortium (INSACOG) which identified the Delta variant in India during the pandemic, and other major biological data centric projects in India like Genome-India and Microbiome-India. I am also a member of the Bioscience Application Development group of National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) in India. I have been promoting wider acceptance of cloud computing and FAIR compliant data sharing in India.
Since 2018 I have been closely associated with formulation of Biotech PRIDE guidelines for deposition of various types of biological data in Indian Biological Data Center (IBDC), a FAIR compliant central repository located in India. I am Co-Coordinator and Principal Investigator (PI) of the IBDC project of DBT, which is being implemented by three institutes of DBT, namely RCB, NII and ICGEB.
Apart from my role in national data science projects, I am also actively engaged in international initiatives in the area of data science and AI/ML. In 2020 I served in the Digital Revolution taskforce of G-20 organized by Saudi Arabia and contributed to a white paper on role of AI in digital revolution. I am a PI of the NSM supported PDB-India project which is working to establish primary data repository for structural biology in India similar to RCSB, PDB-Europe and PDB-Japan under the umbrella of wwPDB. International advisory committee (AC) of wwPDB has approved a roadmap for PDB-India to join as Associate Member and then transition to full membership.
My association with CODATA goes back over a decade, starting from having jointly organized the Annual SciDataCON at New Delhi in 2014. I have served as member of the Indian National CODATA Committee from 2014 to 2018 and served as the Chair of the Indian National CODATA Committee in 2018-2019.
I believe given an opportunity to be a member of the executive committee, I can utilize my experience in biological data science to work for the CODATA’s vision of advancing open science by connecting data and people.