P. N. Rangarajan, born in Bengaluru in the south Indian state of Karnataka, secured a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 1989 and did his post doctoral work at Salk Institute for Biological Studies during 1990-92.[2] After serving Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a research associate for a year, he returned to India to join IISc at the department of biochemistry in 1993 where he is a professor. At IISc, he has been carrying out research on how neurotropic viruses induce changes in eukaryoticgene expression in humans.[3] He leads a team of scientists engaged in the studies of Pichia pastoris, a methylotrophicyeast species, with regard to its transcription factors and the regulation of carbon metabolism.[4] He has also done extensive work on vaccine development against infectious diseases such as rabies, hepatitis B and Japanese encephalitis and he and his colleagues were successful in developing a new DNA-based vaccine against rabies.[5] Later, they improved the vaccine performance by combining the DNA-based rabies vaccine with a controlled quantity of inactivated virus prepared through cell culture.[6] The work earned Rangarajan and his colleagues Patent Cooperation Treaty[7] and Indian patents[8] and the vaccine, reportedly cheaper to produce than conventional cell culture rabies vaccines, is being marketed by Indian Immunologicals Limited, under the brand name, Dinarab.[9] His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles[10][note 2] of which many have been listed by online article repositories such as Google Scholar[11] and ResearchGate.[12]
Rangarajan's work has attracted research by other scientists[13] and he has delivered invited speeches or keynote addresses including the lecture on Gene Regulation in Eukaryotes: Diversity in general Transcription factors at IIT Madras[14] and the address on Transcriptional interference in the methylotrophic yeast, Pichia pastoris at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram in October 2012.[15] He was the co-convenor of the lecture workshop on Recent Advances in Biotechnology of Health and Disease (BHD-2011) organized by Madurai Kamaraj University in 2011[16] and has been involved in conducting open courses on Eukaryotic Gene Expression.[17]
Rangarajan is married to Radha and the couple has two children, Karthik and Meghana. The family lives in Rajajinagar in Bengaluru.[18]
Awards and honors
Rangarajan received the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology in 2001.[19] The National Academy of Sciences, India elected him as a fellow in 2002.[20] The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 2007.[21] The Indian Academy of Sciences elected him as a fellow the same year[22] and he became an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2017.[23][note 3]
Selected bibliography
Saha, Sougata; Ramanathan, Anand; Rangarajan, Pundi N. (2006). "Regulation of Ca2+/calmodulin kinase II inhibitor α (CaMKIINα) in virus-infected mouse brain". Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. 350 (2): 444–449. doi:10.1016/j.bbrc.2006.09.066. PMID17010311.
