Anurag Agrawal (medical scientist)
Anurag Agrawal, born on 17 February 1972, joined the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi in 1989 for his MBBS after which he moved to the US for his residency at the Baylor College of Medicine where he also worked as a fellow at the Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care and as an assistant professor. In 2004, he enrolled for his doctoral studies at the Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute of the University of Delhi from where he secured a PhD in 2007. Subsequently, he joined the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and serves as the director. Agrawal's research covers the fields of lung diseases, asthma and functional issues related to mitochondria and he is credited with establishing a functional link between the three diseases, thereby elucidating how stem cells donated mitochondrial cells to human lung cells that had turned dysfunctional. He heads the lab on Respiratory Disease Biology in IGIB and is involved in translational research on disorders such as obesity, asthma and diabetes. His studies have been documented in a number of articles; Agrawal received the Lady Tata Young Researcher Award in 2010, the same year as he was selected for the Swarnajayanthi fellowship of the Department of Biotechnology. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 2014. A year later, he received the National Bioscience Award for Career Development for the year 2015. He is also a recipient of the senior fellowship of the Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance.
Awards and honors
The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Medical Sciences in 2014. He is also a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology which he received in 2015.