Amitabh Joshi

Biography

Amitabh Joshi, born on 4 March 1965 to Devi Datt Joshi-Nirmala couple in the Indian city of Agra which is famous for Taj Mahal, did his graduate (BSc Hons in Botany - 1988) and master's studies (Msc in Genetics - 1988) from Delhi University and moved to Washington State University from where he obtained a PhD in 1993, under the guidance of John N. Thompson and Michael E. Moody. His thesis for PhD was Coevolution and variation in competition between Drosophila species, commonly known as fruit flies and his collaboration with Moody returned a number of articles published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. During this period, he also worked as research assistant (1987–88) and a teaching assistant at the university (1987–93). He stayed in the US till 1996 to complete his post-doctoral studies on adaptation to larval and adult crowding in fruit flies at the laboratory of Laurence D. Mueller of the University of California, Irvine and returned to India to work as a visitor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences of Indian Institute of Science for a month. In August 1996, he joined Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research as a member of faculty at the Animal Behaviour Unit and shifted to Evolutionary and Organismal Biology Unit in 1998 where he rose in ranks from a faculty fellow (1998–2001) to an associate professor, reaching the position of a professor in 2007. He heads the Evolutionary Biology Laboratory of the institution where he hosts a number of research scholars. In between, he served as a visiting faculty at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2001. He is also an adjunct faculty of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali and resides in Bengaluru, in Karnataka.

Legacy

Joshi continues his early researches on Drosophila but has now combined his evolution studies with theoretical work using computer simulations. His researches focuses on the inter-relations between the genetics of organisms and their ecology and the influence of these factors in their evolutionary path. His laboratory studies various evolutionary aspects such as the rate of development, patterns of progeny and ageing and investigates the development of competitive abilities and stress resistance in organisms. His researches have been documented by way of a number of articles and several of them have been listed by many major online article repositories such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academic Tree and PubFacts. Besides, he has published a book, Stability in Model Populations, co-authored by his post-doctoral guide, Laurence D. Mueller. He is on the list of mentors of doctoral studies at the Indian Institute of Science and has guided several scholars in their researches.

At Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Joshi has served as a member of the Screening Committee for Life Sciences and sat as the convenor of the committee in 1999 and 2000. He is a former member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Evolutionary and Organismal Biology Unit of JNCASR during 1999–2001 and was the coordinator of the Discussion Meeting on Origin and Evolution of Life, an ISRO-IAS event held in Coorg in 2000. He was also associated in organizing seminars and conferences such as the Association for Tropical Biology-Annual Meeting (Bengaluru 2001), One-Day Symposium on Evolutionary Biology in honour of Stephen Jay Gould (JNCASR 2002), Workshop on Adaptation and Time (JNCASR 2002) and Four Day Lecture Programme on Evolutionary and Organismal Biology (Delhi University 2002). He is a former member of the Vice Chancellor's Empowered Committee for Restructuring the Undergraduate Science Programme of Delhi University (2002–04), Planning Committee of Indian School in Chronobiology (2002), Expert Consultative Committee of the Department of Science and Technology (2004) and Sectional Committee of Indian Academy of Sciences for Animal and Plant Sciences (2004–06) and sits in the Board of Studies in Genetics of Mysore University and Project Advisory Committee for Animal Sciences of Department of Science and Technology. He has been associated with Resonance: Journal of Science Education (editorial board member, associate editor), Journal of Biosciences on the Origin of Life (guest editor 1997–98), Journal of Genetics on Evolutionary genetics: the Drosophila model (guest editor–2003) and the Journal of Genetics (editor). He was also among the 370 scientists who expresses their disapproval of the handling of 2016 JNU protests.

Awards and honors

Joshi was selected as a Young Associate by the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1997 for a period of three years and was elected as its fellow in 2001. The same year, he was elected by Berlin Institute for Advanced Study as a fellow for his project, Life History Evolution in Drosophila. He was elected as a National Academy of Sciences, India fellow in 2002 and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2009 for his contributions to Biological Sciences. A J. C. Bose National fellow, Joshi was selected for the National Leadership Award of the Lakshmipat Singhania Academy-IIM Lucknow in 2010. In 2011, the Indian National Science Academy elected him as a fellow.