Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava

Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava is an Indian bio-informatician and head of computational biology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology.
Personal.
Early years and education.
Raghava was born in village Nagla Karan, Bulandshahr district (UP), India in 1963. He completed his primary education from his native place Bulandshahr and post graduation from Meerut, UP in 1984. After completing his M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, he joined Institute of Microbial Technology as a computer scientist. There he continued to work on various projects and became the head of Bioinformatics Centre in 1994. In 1996 he received a doctorate in bioinformatics from Institute of Microbial Technology and Panjab University, Chandigarh.
Career and higher studies.
Raghava joined the Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh in 1986 as a computer scientist and developer. He is also coordinator of the distributed information centre supported by DBT under the BTISNET programme, where his primary duty is to build and maintain infrastructure required for protein modelling and engineering.
He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford university as well as at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Cambridge for two years (1996–98). During this period he learned and developed a number of web servers for application in computational biology, particularly in protein modelling.
Achievements and awards.
Raghava received the Young Leader Award in Science & Technology, Lakshmipat Singhania – Indian Institute of Management Lucknow National Leadership awards 2011 He was listed as one of eight highly cited Indians scientists by Thomson Reuters in 2014. He was awarded NASI-Reliance Industries Platinum Jubilee Awards, 2009 in Biological Sciences
Thomson Reuters presented him Research Excellence ~ India Research Front Awards 2009.
He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for 2008
Research interests.
Raghava developed a method for calculating concentration of antibodies and antigens from ELISA data, and he a prediction method for protein secondary structure prediction. In 1999 he established his research group at IMTECH with emphasis on protein structure prediction and genome annotation. In 2001, his group also focused on "Computer aided vaccine design" with emphasis on subunit vaccine design. Since 2006, his group is trying to integrate bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, pharmaco-informatics and clinical informatics in order to develop a single platform for designing drugs in silico.
Web services and software.
Raghava is an adherent of public domain software or open source software, and his group both uses and develops free software for academic use. Recently his group have initiated a web portal Computational Resource for Drug Discovery (CRDD) under Open Source Drug Discovery.