The Indian Academy of Neurosciences (IAN) came to existence in 1982 with the efforts of Late Prof. K.P. Bhargava, Prof. Mahdi Hasan, Prof. S.S. Parmar, Prof. B.N. Dhawan, Prof. P.K. Seth and other eminent neuroscientists. Ever since its inception the Academy has been active in promoting neurosciences. Every year IAN conducts an International Conference and Amrita researchers and PhD students have been regularly participating in the events.

This year, on November 2, 2014 the General Body of Indian Academy of Neurosciences held its meeting at National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, India and elected Dr. Shyam Diwakar as Member of the Executive Committee for a period of three years. Dr. Shyam has been a life member of IAN since 2004.

This is an unique opportunity to promote neuroscience activities and to fulfill objectives of IAN. Dr. Shyam said he is honored by this recognition and looks forward to promote more activities in the region through this role.

Amrita Computational Neuroscience PhD students and research fellows were also invited to participate at the XXXII annual conference of the IAN based on the theme Translational Research: Novel Approaches to Treat Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders from November 1-3, 2014 organized at NIMHANS, Bengaluru, India. The presentations included the Role of Neuroscience Virtual Labs (Hemalatha Sasidharakurup, Rakhi Radhamani, Nijin Faisel, Dhanush Kumar), Robotic Principles Derived from Brain Circuits (Asha Vijayan, Latha A.R., Arathi Nair) on FPGA Hardware, Role of Big Data, Natural Language Processing and Neuroinformatics (Nidheesh Melethadathil), Computational Neuroscience (Afila Yoosef) of Rat Cerebellum Microcircuit Functions, Mutual Information Based Analysis of Excitation in the Granular Layer (Arathi G R), Motor Imagery and EEG (Sandeep Bodda), Robotic Arm Kinematics based on Cerebellum-like Models (Chaitanya Nutakki).

“Conferences of IAN tend to bring out a community atmosphere for us researchers, motivating us to convert preliminary results into full-fledged papers. We got interesting inputs from fellow researchers especially in Neuroscience. Being a data informatics person, I found it valuable.”, said Nidheesh Melethadathil, who is also an Assistant Professor at Amrita School of Biotechnology. He is a part-time Ph.D. student working on neuroinformatics at the computational neuroscience lab at the Amritapuri campus.