The Hindu Business Line : 4 Indians make it to top innovators' list

FOUR Indians have found themselves a place in the annual list of 35 top technology innovators under the age of 35 (TR35) brought out by Technology Review magazine from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "The winners from previous years (when it was the TR100) have changed your world. So will the people you're about to meet," says the magazine in its latest edition.

The Indian entries in the listings are:

Narasimha Chari: The 31-year-old founder of Tropos Networks, Chari has been feted for setting the wireless mesh networking standard. In the late 90s, he saw the possibility of creating communications infrastructure using wireless mesh networks — which at the time was the exclusive province of the military.

While being a physics grad student at Harvard University, he created elegant algorithms that tailored mesh networking for routine civilian communications. Tropos Networks helped launch commercial wireless mesh networking.

Tropos' services dominate the nascent mesh-networking industry. Telecommunications companies fear the proliferation of the technology, seeing it as a threat to their Internet access businesses.

Anita Goel: A 32-year-old physicist and physician Anita Goel finds inspiration in the tiny: the proteins that inch their way along DNA, reading and copying the genes inside every cell. As a physics graduate student at Harvard University, Goel developed a theory to explain how these molecular motors work.

While working on her medical degree at Harvard in 2004, she founded Nanobiosym to apply her theories to the development of nanotech devices for controlling these proteins; such devices could identify viruses and bacteria in, say, a blood sample more accurately and cheaply than the current techniques.

Rajit Manohar: An associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, Manohar (33) speeds up chips and lowers power consumption by removing the clock; his chips are 10 times more energy efficient than previous clock-less chips. Instead of a separate clock network carrying a global timing signal, Manohar's chips use short wires to carry signals that alert successive operations when the previous operations have finished.

Shiladitya Sengupta: As a master's student in India, 33-year-old Shiladitya Sengupta developed an anti-inflammatory gel that is now sold in his home country under the brand name Nimulid.

During his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, he revealed how a protein that causes liver regeneration promotes blood vessel growth, and co-founded Dynamic Biosystems to turn the discovery into treatments for chronic wounds such as pressure sores. But a child's toy — several small balloons encapsulated in a bigger one — inspired what may be his greatest innovation: a nanoscale device to treat cancer.

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