Cancer Systems Biology

Ravi Salgia, MD, PhD, is the Arthur and Rosalie Kaplan Chair in Medical Oncology at City of Hope National Medical Centre. Previously, he was Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Prior to his tenure at the University of Chicago, Dr. Salgia was faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He earned his undergraduate summa cum laude in mathematics, biology, and chemistry, and then his MD and PhD degrees from Loyola University in Chicago. His research interests focus on novel therapeutics against lung cancer, and he also maintains a strong interest in chaos theory and fractals and their application to cancer, especially lung cancer. Dr. Salgia has been honoured with numerous awards, including the ASCO Excellence in Teaching Award.

Prof. Mohit Kumar Jolly earned his Bachelors and Masters degree from IIT Kanpur and PhD from Rice University, all in Bioengineering. Before moving to Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore to start his independent group in 2018, he was a Gulf Coast Consortia Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Cancer Biology. His research interests are in phenotypic plasticity and heterogeneity driving cancer metastasis and drug resistance. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of NPJ Systems Biology & Applications. He received 2022 Young Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur, 2023 ICTP Prize, and 2024 Young Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award, Rice University.

Prof. Prakash Kulkarni received his PhD in biochemistry from India and did postdoctoral training at the Indian Institute of Science, and New York University. He was an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins. Subsequently, he was Associate Professor at the Keck Laboratory for Structural Biology, University of Maryland. Previously, Prof. Kulkarni held Staff Scientist positions in Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, and Biology & Biological Engineering at Caltech, and in Genetics at Yale. His research interests are focused on understanding how protein conformational dynamics contributes to phenotypic switching, especially in evolution of multicellularity, cancer, and in non-genetic heterogeneity. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, UK.

Prof. Govindan Rangarajan obtained an Integrated MSc (Hons) degree from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, and a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He then worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, University of California, Berkeley, before returning to India in 1992. He has been a faculty member of the Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), since 1992. He is currently the Director of IISc.Prof. Rangarajan’s research interests include nonlinear dynamics and chaos and time series analysis. He is a JC Bose National Fellow. He is also a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He was awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques (Knight of the Order of Academic Palms) by the Government of France. He was also a Homi Bhabha Fellow.