Alok Bhattacharya is Professor of Biology. He is the recipient of Robert McNamara Fellowship (World Bank), Rockefeller Biotechnology Career Development Award, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize and JC Bose Fellowship, and is a fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian Academy of Sciences. He also served as one of the Vice Presidents of INSA. Following his Ph.D. at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, he trained at the National Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, USA. He spent a large part of his independent career at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where his scientific interests were in the area of infectious diseases, biology of parasitic pathogens and genomics. He is credited with helping to set up one of the first teaching and research programs on Bioinformatics and Computation Biology in India. His current research interests are rare diseases, computational genomics and biology of pathogenic parasites.