Speaking at the press conference for the Infosys Prize 2021, an award to felicitate scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin on Thursday, Gopalakrishnan said that data protection laws will help research in the country by making data available in a reliable format and will clarify the process for making such data available.
“I believe that the data protection laws will make data available for research in a manner that is predictable and protects the privacy of the people. If you look at the non-personal data protection recommendation framework that we’ve created, it talks about making datasets available for research as a shared infrastructure,” Gopalakrishnan added.
His comments came in the backdrop the the announcement of this year’s winners of the Infosys Prize, which included researchers in six categories for their work on studying the effects of climate change on ecosystems, designing platforms for rapid testing of transmissible diseases, better understanding nuclear force to harness its energy, on sexual violence and jurisprudence in India, among others.
The Infosys Science Foundation, which runs the award, felicitated Chandrasekhar Nair, CTO of Molbio Diagnostics for the development of TrueNat, a point-of-care testing platform for PCR-based diagnostics that has enabled testing for millions of Covid-19 cases, with the award in the Engineering and Computer Science category.
Angela Barreto Xavier of the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal won the award in the Humanities category for her work research in conversion and violence in the Portuguese empire in India, especially Goa, while Mahesh Sankaran from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) won the award in the Life Sciences category for his research into the ecology of Savannah ecosystems in the Western Ghats.
Other awardees included Neeraj Kayal of Microsoft Research lab in Bengaluru, who won the award in the Mathematics category for his work on algebraic computation, Bedangadas Mohanty from NISER in the Physical Sciences category for his investigations of the nuclear force that could lead to better harnessing nuclear energy.
Pratiksha Baxi from the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU won the prize in the Social Sciences category for her research on how gendered violence is reproduced by juridical practice.
“For any nation and society, world-leading science is a matter of prestige and a contribution to excellence in the country and the world. Recognition of exploration, innovation, and response to scientific and societal challenges is the goal of the Infosys Prize. Awards such as these create role models of science and scholarship that future generations can emulate,” said Gagandeep Kang, a leading microbiologist and virologist who is a fellow of the Royal Society, and the chief guest of the Infosys Prize 2021 award ceremony.
Winners of the award were given a pure gold medal, a citation and a prize-purse of $ 100,000.
The Infosys Science Foundation said that the laureates were chosen a pool of 201 nominations received this year and by a jury consisting of former World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu; Shrinivas Kulkarni, a professor at the California Institute of Technology; Mriganka Sur, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Chandrashekhar Khare, professor of mathematics at UCLA; Arvind, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT; and Akeel Bilgrami from the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University.
