Gautam Menon

Gautam Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology as well as Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) at Ashoka University. He is a Professor with the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, where he was the founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He is an adjunct Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India.

He completed a BSc. (Hons) in Physics at St. Stephens College, Delhi, an MSc from IIT Kanpur, and a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Following post-doctoral work at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, he joined the Institute of Mathematical Sciences' Theoretical Physics Group.

He was awarded a DST Fast Track Fellowship for Young Scientists in 2002 and the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the DST in 2005. He was named a DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Investigator in 2010 and an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society in 2012. He was a Visiting Professor at both the Mechanobiology Institute and the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore in the period 2011-2013.

He serves on scientific review committees of several international agencies, among them the Human Frontier Science Program and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance. His research has been funded by the European Union, the Indo-French CEFIPRA, the BMGF, the WHO as well as the DBT, DST and DAE in India. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India in 2019.

He works currently on biophysical problems including nuclear architecture, axonal transport, collective cell migration and cell adhesion. The modeling of infectious disease and its implications for public policy is a long-standing interest. He has written extensively for the general public on the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from his scientific work, he is interested in making science accessible to the public.