Chief Guest & Lifetime Achievement Award
Prof.VijayRaghawan FRS
He is Principal Scientific Adviser to PM.He is a renowned biologist & has made outstanding contributions as a developmental geneticist & neurobiologist.His .original work on fruitfly Drosophila revealed principles & mechanisms that control assembly & wiring of nerves &muscles during development . And how they control locomotor behaviours.Actually a new species of gecko is named after him as Hemidactylus VijayRaghavani in Dec2018.He is an inspirational leader,tirelesslypromoting excellence in Biological sciences. He is on board of management of ICTS(International Center for Theoretical Sciences)&,TIFR Center forInterdisciplinary Sciences,He is also a Fellow of Academyof Sciences for Developing World ,Indian Academy of Sciences .He has the honour of being elected Foreign Associate of U S National Academy of Sciences. A grateful country has also felicitated with the honour of Padmashri.
HKF Vijnan Ratna Award
Dr. K. SIVAN
(Chairman ISRO)
A humble son of a farmer who studied in local government schools in Tamil medium at Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu is now heading India's premier Space agency ISRO.
K Sivan, now Director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre,who is the Secretary of Space Department and Chairman of Space Commission and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is a native of Tarakkanvilai in Kanyakumari district.
HKF Vijnan Bhushan Award
Dr. Shekhar C. Mande
(Director of the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS))
Dr. Shekhar C. Mande, the current Director of the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune has been appointed as the new Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), India. CSIR is one of the world’s largest publicly-funded research and development organizations and is known for its contributions in diverse areas of science.
Dr. Mande is a leading structural and computational biologist and has more than 100 publications to his credit. His laboratory at NCCS has been involved in research on the structural characterization of Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins and the computational analysis of genome-wide protein: protein interactions.