An assistant professor at the School of Biochemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi Dr Aditya Kumar Padhi has been honoured with the prestigious ‘Young Scientist Award’ for 2022 by the Bioinformatics and Drug Discovery Society India, for the pioneering work in bioinformatics and computational biology.

Padhi was endowed with this award at the BIDDS annual awards ceremony during the 2nd international conference cum workshop on recent trends in structural bioinformatics and computer-aided drug design held at the department of bioinformatics, Alagappa University Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu, from November 21 to 25.

According to the IIT (BHU) officials, Padhi was selected on the basis of cutting-edge research done over the last several years in the areas of computational biology, high-throughput protein design, translational bioinformatics, biomolecular simulations and the design of novel proteins and enzymes of biotechnological, bioengineering and therapeutic importance.

Padhi has developed several computational pipelines and protocols for identifying resistance mutations in pathogens (including SARS-CoV-2) and designing protein effectors with non-natural amino acids. The evaluation criteria for the award included: significant and innovative contributions to basic and/or applied Bioinformatics research through a strong record of publications, including peer-reviewed journal papers, review articles, and/or granted patents.

The research has immense applications in fundamental and translational research, including health science, surveillance of resistance mutations in pathogens, disease prediction, design of robust antimicrobial agents, developing next-generation therapeutics strategies, said Padhi.

IIT (BHU) director Prof Pramod Kumar Jain said Padhi’s achievement has brought laurels to the institute. The healthcare informatics, fundamental, as well as translational work done in the laboratory of Padhi, has a great application to the healthcare initiatives of Government of India and with the visionary national mission, such as the ‘PM Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission’ of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, added Jain.

The Technology Innovation Hub (TIH), I-DAPT Hub Foundation, and PARAM Shivay Supercomputing Facility under the National Supercomputing Mission, Government of India at IIT(BHU) supports such award-winning research and technologies, said Jain.