Roddam Narasimha
Fluid dynamicist

Roddam Narasimha is an Indian aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist. He was formerly a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Director of National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) and the Chairman of Engineering Mechanics Unit at JNCASR, Bangalore. He is presently an Honorary Professor at JNCASR and concurrently holds the Pratt & Whitney Chair in Science and Engineering at the University of Hyderabad. He has been awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 2013.

Narasimha’s research has been chiefly concerned with Aerospace Fluid Dynamics and certain related problems in the atmosphere. He has made extensive studies of transitions between laminar and turbulent flow (going in either direction), the structure of shock waves, various characteristics of fully developed turbulent flow (e.g. their memory, the bursting phenomenon in boundary layers), the fluid dynamics of clouds, near-surface temperature distributions and eddy fluxes in atmospheric boundary layers. He has been closely associated with Aerospace technology development in India at both technical and policy-making levels. During 1977-79, he was the Chief Project Coordinator at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.

S. Vishwanath
Water conservation expert

Vishwanath Srikantaiah is a water conservation expert who is renowned for his tireless and pioneering efforts to find solutions to the country’s freshwater crisis. Popularly known as Zenrainman on social media channels, his insightful articles on water and environmental issues frequently appear in mainstream news publications.

A Civil Engineer and Urban Planner by qualification, Vishwanath worked with Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) for 14 years before dedicating himself full-time to solving water issues facing urban and rural communities. He is Trustee – Biome Environmental Trust, an organisation assisting communities in water and sanitation solutions; Director of Biome Environmental Solutions Pvt. Ltd., an architectural firm specializing in sustainable design; and an Adjunct Faculty at the Azim Premji University.

Srikanth Sastry
Physicist

Srikanth Sastry is a Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru. His research interest lies in the area of statistical mechanics, with a focus on understanding a range of unusual and interesting properties of liquids and other soft condensed matter, addressed with computation as a major tool. 

Sastry did his M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Bombay in 1986 and Ph.D. from Boston University in 1993. Soon after his studies, Sastry joined Department of Chemical Engineering at Princeton University in 1996. In 1998 he was a Visiting Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology/ Arizona State University. He has served as a Faculty Fellow at the JNCASR between 1998-2003 and as an Associate Professor from 2003-2008. He worked as a Professor at the TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad during 2012-2014. 

Sastry has received many awards and accolades including J C Bose National Research Fellowship (2015), Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award (2008), Sir C V Raman Young Scientist Award by the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology (KSCST), Swarnajayanti Fellowship (2003), B. M. Birla Science Prize (2001) and the Prof. C N R Rao Oration Award (2001).

Jahnavi Phalkey
Historian of science

Jahnavi Phalkey was appointed Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru in November 2018. Previously she was faculty at King’s College London. She started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London.

She has been a Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). She was external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. Jahnavi is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and has co- edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She holds a doctoral degree in history of science and technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

Doug Herman
Geographer

Doug Herman, formerly a senior geographer at the National Museum of the American Indian, specializes in the cultural knowledge of Hawaii and Pacific Islands. He is now the executive director of the Waioli Corporation in Kaua'i.

Abhishek Hazra
Artist

Abhishek Hazra is an artist based in Bangalore, India. Hazra’s works traverse a diverse, yet closely interconnected mesh of interests. He uses video and performance that often integrate textual fragments drawn from real and fictional scenarios. Histories of science and an ironic fascination with theoretical approaches are just some of the interests that inform his practice.