Guests of Honour

Anannya Dasgupta directs the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy at Krea University where she is also an Associate Professor of Literature in the Division of Literature and the Arts. Among her publications are single authored essays, such as: The Feminist De-brahmanising Pedagogy of Writing, a monograph: Magical Epistemologies: Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern English Drama; collection of essays, Writing In Academia, co-edited, along with Madhura Lohokare and co-written essays “Something of Our Own to Say” and “Globalising Writing Pedagogy.” Her current work is focused on developing writing pedagogies for the Indian classrooms from school to the university level.

K. VijayRaghavan is the DAE Homi Bhabha Chair Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. From April 2018-April 2022, he served as the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. Before that, from 2013 to 2018, he was the Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. Vijay Raghavan’s research interests are in developmental biology, genetics and neurogenetics, on the principles and mechanisms that control the nervous system and muscles during development and how these neuromuscular systems direct specific locomotor behaviours. In addition to continuing his laboratory research interests, VijayRaghavan is studying how sustainable development can be enabled in climate change and the energy crisis. In this context, his focus is on how the university system in India can be empowered to this task and how industry collaboration in research can be enhanced.

K N Raghavan is currently Professor of Mathematics in the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences at Krea. He moved to Krea recently–in the summer of 2024—from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Matscience), where he spent most of his professional career (2001–2024). Raghavan was educated at IIT Delhi and Purdue University and held positions at Michigan State University and Chennai Mathematical Institute before joining Matscience. Raghavan’s research interests lie in the area of Representation Theory. He is the co-author with V. Lakshmibai of the monograph in Springer’s Encyclopedia of Mathematics series entitled “Standard Monomial Theory, an Invariant Theoretic Approach”. Throughout his tenure at Matscience, Raghavan was involved in various outreach efforts. With physicist colleague Gautam Menon, he started “Science at the Sabha”, an annual science outreach event aimed at the general public and held at the Music Academy in Chennai, and ran it for four years 2016–2019, before handing the reins over.