Happy New Year! We welcome 2019 with a lot of hope and prayers.
03/January/2019: Welcome Pushpendra! Pushpendra Yadav has joined us for his project. He is a second year MSc student from Hislop College, Nagpur. For his 3 months’ MSc project, he will work on a histone deacetylase protein. We wish him a great stay with us.
05/January/2019: New Year Lunch!! DVasuLab members, their families and student friends had a New Year special lunch at Nakli Dhaba, Mayfair Lagoon. Food was great, and so was the bill. 😉 Some pictures below.
06/January/2019: Many Happy Returns of the Day to Rajiv!! Rajiv’s birthday was a Sunday and we had the lab celebrations on Monday (07th Jan). Rajiv gave birthday treat at Garam Masala restaurant in Chandrasekharpur on the 14th of Jan 2019.
11/January/2019: Spring cleaning in DVasuLab! The spring cleaning got spilled over to the New Year. However, from now onwards, we hope to have a dedicated lab cleaning day, once every month. The cleaning session ended with an evening pizza party! Good motivation indeed!!
01/February/2019: Ruchir’s JRF to SRF upgradation! Having completed two years with us, Ruchir had his thesis advisory committee meeting to evaluate his work progress and to consider his upgradation from JRF to SRF. With two crystal structures in his kitty and a good amount of preliminary data to be taken further for his thesis completion, he has made considerable progress and thus he became an SRF! Good job Ruchir!!
12/February/2019 to 16/February/2019: Ajit is at RCB, Faridabad, attending the international workshop and conference on “Structure-assisted development of novel therapeutics“.
22/February/2019: Ashish’s wedding in Bhubaneswar!! Ashish and Sunanda (TKBLab) become a wedded couple. The whole lab and a good number of their well-wishers from ILS took part in the wedding. Some snaps below:
28/February/2019: National Science Day celebration by ILS! Manas and Dileep joined Rupesh Dash and his students for the Science Day event in Dhenkanal Autonomous College. Ruchir joined TKB team to Rayagada. Rajiv, Ajit and Soumen stayed back and managed the lab’s stall at ILS. Some pictures below:
01/March/2019: DVasuLab has a new PhD student – Ketul Saharan! Welcome Ketul! We wish you the very best for a pleasant and productive PhD with us.
04/March/2019: Dileep @ Ahmedabad University! Dileep spent a day at the university as Dr. Neha Jain’s guest, giving a talk on protein crystallography and he had an interaction with the PhD students there at the Department of Biological and Life Sciences.
05/March/2019 to 07/March/2019: Dileep is teaching @ MS University Baroda. Dileep, along with Dr. Gayathri Pananghat from IISER, Pune is helping to cover the syllabus of Structural Biology course for the integrated BS-MS program at the Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology in MS University. He took 6 lectures in total!
08/March/2019: Birthday Wishes Ajit! Ajit had his birthday celebrated with lab members and his friends. Blast was this year’s theme.
09/March/2019: Sudeshna’s shaadi! Sudeshna got married to her sweetheart Gyanajit! Stay blessed and happy the newly weds! Twenty of us from ILS (lab and her friends) went to her place near Mathakaragola (4 hours journey from ILS) for the wedding. After [Manas-Chinmayee] and [Ashish-Sunanda], [Sudeshna-Gyanajit] wedding was the third one from our lab within a year!
20/March/2019: Pushpendra’s farewell! After spending three months with us for his MSc project, Pushpendra is going back to Nagpur tomorrow. We had a farewell lunch for him at Smog Resto Café near Sainik School Chowk and a small post-lunch ‘dialogue session’ in the lab.
22/March/2019: It is Holi here, but not a Holiday! But that doesn’t reduce the fun of the festival.
04/April/2019: Dileep at Sambalpur University! He gave a talk at the “National Conference on Recent Advances in Biological Sciences” as part of the Golden Jubilee celebration of School of Life Sciences of the University.
06/April/2019: Gathering at DVasu residence! We all needed that much needed break and some fun time together. The recently married lab members deserved a welcome too! So the venue this time was Dileep’s residence, with some Kerala food (courtesy: Kerala Delights, Bhubaneswar and home kitchen).
19/April/2019: Birthday Wishes Manas! Manas’ birthday fell on Good Friday. And then four of us were away. So celebration got postponed to 25/April/2019 which turned out to be Manas and Chinmayee’s first wedding anniversary too! So the lab celebrated with the couple and friends in the late evening. Manas gave his birthday treat at Hi Bhubaneswar restaurant in Patia on the 26th.
21/April/2019 to 24/April/2019: AUC @ IIT Kharagpur! Ajit, Ruchir, Nausad and Dileep were at IIT Kharagpur to do Analytical Ultra-Centrifugation (AUC) experiments. It was a great experience. Their facility is in great condition and we got good quality data. Many thanks to Dr. Soumya De from the School of Bioscience. His student Ms. Snigdha Maiti and Mr. Sourajit were of great help and our gratitude to Dr. Amit Das, HOD of the School as well. Dileep gave an invited talk at the school on 23rd April.
27/April/2019: Farewell to Sudeshna! Sudeshna who has been with us for more than two years, is bidding adieu as she is moving Punjab with her hubby. The group gave her a farewell lunch on Saturday at QZine Restaurant in Patia, Bhubaneswar. 30th April will be her last working day with us. Good luck Sudeshna! We will miss you for sure!!
09/May/2019: Lab brunch at CCD! Our grant proposal with SERB got approved! With the extreme summer weather and non-a/c labs following the cyclone Fani, we decided to chill out a bit. We had our brunch at Cafe Coffee Day, Jaydev Vihar.
11/May/2019: Vipul’s party at Sandys Tower! Vipul gave us a treat at Sandy’s Tower. Occasion – Long ago he finished his PhD defense and now he is prepping for his Norwegian voyage! For a change, the guys got a bit tipsy, so the pics did not come out that well! 😛
13/May/2019: Welcome Ankur! Ankur Singh, a 3rd year BS-MS (Cell & Molecular Biology) student from MS University Baroda has joined our group as a visiting student for 2 months. Have a great stay with us Ankur!
16/May/2019: Welcome Subhashree! Subhashree Sahu, an MSc (Applied Microbiology) student from KIIT University has joined us as a summer trainee. She will be with us for two months! Enjoy your training period and have a great learning experience Subhashree!
17/May/2019: Happy Birthday Ashish! Ashish had his birthday celebrated with friends and lab mates. We had Shankar Sahu from MS University as a special guest. Ashish sponsored his Birthday dinner on 18th May at TCD Restaurant in Niladri Vihar.
22/May/2019: Vipul’s send-off party! Vipul is going Bergen University, Norway for his postdoc. So we gave him a send-off party at ‘Mad Mule’ in Kharbela Nagar. We had a blast, so that Vipul would have a great future ahead!
24/May/2019: Nausad’s pizza party! Nausad’s PhD work got accepted for publication in Nature Communications! So in the late evening, he gave a pizza party for all the lab members. Way to go Nausad!
30/May/2019: Many Happy Returns of the Day Ruchir! We celebrated Ruchir’s birthday with his friends and lab members. It was fun! His birthday treat happened much later on 10th July at Grand Kalinga Restaurant, Niladri Vihar!
04/June/2019: Congrats Ashish! The day started with the good news that Ashish’s manuscript got accepted for publication in the journal “Molecules“. Way to go Ashish! This is just your start!
10/June/2019: Welcome Annapurna! Annapurna Sahoo has joined our group as our new Lab Technician. She comes with a lot of research experience from S. Korea! We wish her a pleasant stay with us at DVasuLab.
19/June/2019 to 22/June/2019: DVasu gang at BARC, Mumbai for National Seminar on Crystallography (NSC47)! Ashish, Rajiv, Manas, Ruchir and Ketul attended the NSC.
22/June/2019: Congrats Ashish! Ashish bags the best poster award at the 47th National Seminar on Crystallography (NSC47) held at BARC, Mumbai from 19-22 June 2019. You never stop to make us proud! We are sure your hard work will get paid off in a big way.
05/July/2019: Farewell to trainees! Ankur is returning and Subhashree and Soumen are also soon finishing their projects. So we gave a combined farewell to the three of them at Moody Blues, Press Chowk. The dinner got sponsored by Ashish – for his publication and poster award!
04/August/2019: DVasuLab at Subhashree’s home! Subhashree invited us all to her home in Bhubaneswar. We had such a nice time and awesome food.
16/August/2019: ILS seminar awards 2018-19 – Two from our group! We got yet another reason to celebrate! Ashish and Ruchir got 2nd place in Work Presentation and Journal Presentation categories, respectively! Congratulations guys!! Keep making us proud.
28/August/2019: Lab cleaning & Pizza party! Expecting esteemed visitors, we had a mega lab cleaning event. The cleaning was spearheaded by Annapurna! The tired souls finally had a grand pizza party to recover! Dominos rocks!
05/September/2019: Teachers’ Day Celebration @ DVasuLab. Teachers Day was celebrated with cake and evening snacks!
11/September/2019: Dileep’s Birthday – the 09/11 man! The lab celebrated Dileep’s birthday with cake and snacks. Some of the colleagues also joined in. Otherwise, it was the usual gang.
13/September/2019 – 19/September/2019: Group’s RRCAT beam time!Ruchir, Nausad and Ketul had gone for synchrotron data collection at RRCAT, Indore. They are back after sleepless days/nights, with some good datasets!
22/September/2019 – 28/September/2019: AUCsome time in IIT Kharagpur! Rajiv and Ajit are in IIT Kharagpur to perform some interesting AUC experiments.
24/September/2019 – 25/September/2019: DSC @ IISER-Berhampur! Ashish had a brief attempt with Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) experiments at IISER-Berhampur. He might have to go there again to complete the experiments.
30/September/2019: DVasuLab turns six! Baby steps are over and now we shall walk like a child.
08/October/2019: Congratulations Rajiv and Ashish! We got the good news that Rajiv’s manuscript in Scientific Reports, in collaboration with Dr. Shantibhusan Senapati’s group in ILS and Ashish’s review manuscript in Cell Stress and Chaperones got accepted for publication! Congratulations!
19/October/2019: DVasuLab @ Ketul’s abode! We all had a great time with barbecue and dinner at Ketul’s place. Food was awesome!
01/November/2019: Happy Birthday Nausad! Many were on vacation, however, celebrations did not have any effect. Some snaps from Nausad’s birthday party!
05/November/2019 – 08/November/2019: Ajit @ IISF, Kolkata! Ajit is participating in the Young Scientists Conference as part of the India International Science Festival (IISF), Kolkata. He had a poster presentation there.
11/November/2019 – 12/November/2019: Manas @ AIIMS New Delhi! As a representative from our group, Manas is at AIIMS New Delhi to participate in the Indo-Italian Elettra Beamline Workshop: Application in Crystallography and Drug Discovery.
17/November/2019: Birthday Greetings Aritreyee! As the birthday fell on a weekend, the celebrations got postponed. We had the customary cake cutting and snacks session on the 20th November.
23/November/2019 – 24/November/2019: DVasuLab gang members and their spouses at Satkosia Sands Resort! It was a much needed break from the routine lab life. Some pics can be seen below.
23/November/2019: Our manuscript got accepted in NAR! The evening of 23rd brought us the good news that Ajit (and Aritreyee)’s manuscript got accepted in Nucleic Acids Research! Such a sweet moment! And that too while on a group outing.
03/December/2019: Nausad gets CSIR-SRA fellowship! The evening brought the good news that Nausad has been selected for CSIR’s SRA fellowship scheme! Congratulations Nausad!!! We all are soooo happy for you!
13/December/2019: Ashish’s Pre-Synopsis Presentation! Friday the 13th was auspicious for us! Ashish is getting ready to submit his thesis and so he gave his open Pre-Synopsis presentation at ILS. In the late evening we had a little celebration in lab with some pizza.
17/December/2019 – 20/December/2019: Dileep attending AsCA-2019! Dileep was at NUS, Singapore to take part in the Asian Crystallographic Association (AsCA) Conference 2019. He had an oral presentation there.
19/December/2019 – 26/December/2019: Ashish and Rajiv @ CDRI Lucknow. Ashish and Rajiv are at CDRI Lucknow to perform BioSAXS experiments for their protein samples.
23/December/2019: DVasuLab welcomes the MSc dissertation students and the Winter trainee! Mr. Aghil TSA, an Integrated MSc student from the Central University of Tamil Nadu has joined us for a month as a Winter trainee. After last year’s very productive summer training stint, Ms. Subhashree Sahoo (KIIT University, Bhubaneswar) is back with a bang for her six months MSc project. And after a week’s attachment in the lab last year, we have Ms. Asima Nayak (Ravenshaw University, Cuttack) also back with us for the next six months, to do her MSc dissertation. Have fun people!
28/December/2019: Ajit’s party at Hotel New Marrion, Bhubaneswar! The group celebrated Ajit’s manuscript in NAR by having a mega lunch party at New Marrion. The lunch was sponsored by Ajit.
29/December/2019 – 31/December/2019: Dileep @ National Arabidopsis Meeting – 2019. National Arabidopsis Meeting 2019 was organized by NISER Bhubaneswar at Puri. Dileep had an oral presentation at the meeting – the first participation of our group at an Arabidopsis meeting.
31/December/2019: Bhubaneswar Biophysical Characterization Facility becomes a reality! The year ended with a good news! The joint ILS-NISER grant money for BBCF has arrived. ILS gets sanction for an XRD and AUC, whereas NISER gets it for a Cryo-TEM. Time for serious Biophysics research in Bhubaneswar!!
DVasu Lab 