A Word From The Editor

Hello Friends! Welcome to the fourth issue of InSight. As we celebrate the turning of another issue, I take this opportunity to thank you all who have stood with us, and helped us to continue this journey of InScight Magazine - The IISER Kolkata Science Magazine. Filled with vibrant stories and voices of our alumni, Professors, and guest scientists, this month, we have tried to add colour to the magazine and take the readers on a journey through the history of IISER Kolkata and also to newer domains of Science today.

As Prof. Ayan Banerjee has rightly mentioned, in his words, Science is a method and an attitude, and Prof. Tapas Kumar Sengupta, in his foreword to this issue of InScight Science, is the celebration of unravelling the mysteries of our evolving universe - it is our duty as scientists, who are funded by the tax paid by the commoners, to come out of the labs and take our research to the mass. InScight envisions bridging the gap between distance between the scientists and the masses in the upcoming days.

In this issue, we have featured our alumni from the Department of Physical Sciences - Dr. Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, who is currently working in Germany as a Cryogenic Systems Engineer at attocubes systems AG. We believe that his journey from a BSMS student at IISER to PhD scholar in Israel and finally now as a professional engineer in Germany would show you all a newer perspective of the higher education and job market after BSMS.

In the other two interviews, we have featured Prof. Sushanta Dattagupta - the founder director of IISER Kolkata, and Dr. Sanjit Mitra of IUCAA and a leading scientist of the LIGO-India project, and we hope the interview with them shall help you all in your journey forward.

Apart from the other regular sections of InScight Digest and the articles, we have also started a section this time, where we try to put all the openings of internships, PhD positions, and Post-Doctoral applications. We believe that this section will help the students plan accordingly and in advance for their upcoming academic and scientific journey. However, we ourselves cannot get hold of all the available opportunities, and there shall always be something that we miss out on and could have helped someone, if made available. Thus, we make a sincere request to all to reach out to us and bring the same to our notice so that we can put all those issues in our issues and act as a bank of information regarding the same.

Another section that we have discussed among ourselves and have planned to come up is mainly targeted at the senior PhD, post-doctoral students, as well as the alumni members. We invite you all to write about your PhD thesis. What we are looking for is not exactly your PhD journey, though it is inevitable to keep it behind. Our goal is to discuss the story of your PhD thesis; the philosophy of your work in simpler language, such that students across the disciplines can understand and have a feel for it. We aim to tighten the research community of IISER Kolkata across disciplines, and who knows - you may find a newer possibility and a collaboration for your project too!

We are looking for your contributions and feedback and all the relevant details are all provided in this issue as well in the website of the group. Thank you for journeying with us. On behalf of the entire team, happy reading—and here’s to building bridges, one insight at a time.

With warmth,
Swarnendu Saha,
Editor-in-Chief,
InScight