Dr Ravi Maruthachalam, assistant professor at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research - Thiruvananthapuram (IISER-TVM) was awarded with a DuPont 2014 Young Professor (DYP) award. He formally received this recognition from Dr Ranjan Patnaik, director, DuPont Knowledge Center (DKC), Hyderabad, on the occasion of the Science Day celebration at DKC. He is one of the top 10 international young faculty members to be recognized with the award.

Dr Ravi Maruthachalam received PhD from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) Hyderabad and was a postdoc at Department of Plant Biology, University of California, Davis. He is also a recipient of UC Davis Award of Excellence in Post doctoral research, an early career award from American Society of Plant Biology (ASPB) and currently a Ramalingaswami fellow ( awarded by Department of Biotechnology, Government of India) and Assistant Professor at School of Biology, IISER-Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India.

The DuPont Young Professor program is designed to help promising young and untenured research faculty memebers working in areas of interest to DuPont.

"Young professors award is one of the key DuPont initiatives to encourage academic research that help develop innovations to address the global challenges of food, energy and protection, " said Dr Ranjan Patnaik. He added, "We are delighted to recognize talent in India who have the potential to make path-breaking research contributions."

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Maruthachalam said, "I am very excited and honored to be one among the recipients of this prestegious award."

Dr Maruthachalam's interests are in the area of agricultural biotechnology, plant biology and reproduction. His group is working on cutting edge technologies to expedite plant breeding. This technology has the potential to dramatically reduce the breeding time and resources required for hybrid seed production.