Free Online Courses In Advanced Sciences For Students In India
March 23, 2023
Undergraduate and masters’ students in India, who are interested in advanced cell biology and neurobiology studies, are invited to apply for admission to a free online learning program. It is run by Scienspur.
“We want to inspire scientific curiosity by teaching fundamental concepts and introducing emerging areas,” say Scienspur co-founders Nagaraju Dhanyasi and Jacob Vinay Vikas Konakondla. They expect the courses will help students improve their prospects for admission to advanced science degree programs at the best universities in the world.
The semester long courses, which were first offered in 2021, stretch over 16 weeks and include two to three classes each week of 60 to 90 minutes duration. There were 120 students enrolled for the fall 2022 semester selected from more than 500 applicants. The students were paired with about 40 volunteer instructors and teaching assistants, who are post-doctoral fellows at universities in the United States and Europe.
Scienspur’s focus is on enrolling “students from disadvantaged background and attending public funded schools and colleges.” Last semester, two thirds of the students enrolled were from public colleges and the rest from private colleges. The non-profit does not track the economic backgrounds of its applicants.
Scienspur was initially funded by faculty grants received by Venkatesh Murthy from the Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asian Institute at Harvard University. Murthy, Scienspur’s adviser, is a professor in molecular and cellular biology and the Director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. He continues to use the Mittal funds to support Scienspur.
Murthy was born in Neyvelli, a small industrial town in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. After earning a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, he sought to combine the study of engineering and biology.
An M.S.E. in Bioengineering, from the University of Washington, Seattle, led to his interest in neuroscience. He earned a Ph.D. in Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Washington and pursued postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California. In 1999, he joined Harvard University as an Assistant Professor in 1999. “I continue my daily fight to maintain a healthy balance between pursuing one area of research in depth and getting tempted by exciting new directions,” he notes.
Venkatesh Murthy, Harvard University
Scienspur’s major expenses are the costs of online services for its courses. It uses an online platform offered at a discount price by Atfolks.
The long-term goal of Murthy and the Scienspur founders is to improve the level of education in science, technology, engineering, and math in India. They are seeking academic and philanthropic partners to expand instructions to other courses as well as additional funding to expand their current course offerings.
Dhanyasi is one of the instructors teaching classes in cell biology, neurobiology, and developmental biology. Since 2016, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Dr. Jeff Lichtman’s laboratory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I am interested in uncovering the rules that govern the assembly of neural circuits,” he says. He aims to gain insights into neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. He earned a PhD in Developmental Cell Biology at NCBS-TIFR, Bangalore, India, and Weizmann Institute, Israel.
Dhanyasi grew up in a small village in Prakasam District in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. His parents are farmers and he is the only college graduate in his family. He earned an undergraduate degree from Jawahar Bharati College in Kavali and a MSc in biochemistry, on a fellowship, at Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupathi, both in Andhra. After briefly teaching in Hyderabad, he pursued his PhD.
Konakondla works for a biotech company near Boston which develops immunotherapies for cancer patients. Earlier, he worked as a research facility manager at the Bangalore Life Science Cluster. He earned a Masters in Biotechnology from Bangalore University, a Masters in Molecular and Cell Biology from Brandeis University, Massachusetts and an MBA degree from Sikkim Manipal University.
Scienspur alumni have found internships at IISERs, ACTREC and other research institutes in India and a couple in the U.S., one at the University of North Carolina and the other at Woodshole Oceanographic Institute. The post-doctoral volunteers, who instruct the students, can enhance their teaching skills and improve their prospects for finding teaching jobs.
Scienspur expects to enroll about 200 students for the upcoming summer semester, which will run from May to July.
Dhanyasi and Konakondla expect the courses will enhance the creativity and ingenuity of successful participants in India, leading them to find solutions for improving lives and healthcare. They add that “education is such a strong weapon.”
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