Dr. Mohanasankar S | “Students experimenting, building, failing, & learning is now the norm”| Ep. 17

Building solutions require different layers. In fact, you need to have very, very strong theory and foundations. This Brain Center has one of the most advanced technology platforms. What you realize is, this is one of those very unique fields where it is inherently multi and interdisciplinary. We released the most comprehensive digital brain maps of this phase, which today is a public source. [upbeat music]

Hi, my name is Amrit. We've heard that IIT Madras is the best place to build. [upbeat music] So we've come down to the Sudha and Shankar Innovation Hub. We want to meet some people. These are builders. We want to talk to them about their work, and also ask them, "What makes IIT Madras the best place to build?" [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Best Place to Build podcast. Today, we have Professor Mohan with us. He's a professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras, but also heads the Brain Center and HTIC, and is widely regarded as one of India's top medical technology entrepreneurs, investigators. I don't know, what is the right word I should use, Professor?

You can say builder.

Builder, right. Top medical tech builder in India. Professor, let's start backwards. Let's talk about the Brain Center, because it's stunning, the work that you're doing, and, uh, yeah, we'd like to hear about it more.

So before we get to the Brain Center, you'd probably be interested in knowing how the Brain Center got started. It actually started with an alumnus, Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, who needs no introduction. So in about 2015, '16, uh, when he stepped off of Infosys, he wanted to seed something at IIT Madras that can do really cutting-edge research work related to brain. But he said something very interesting, and I quote that word, "At the intersection of neuroscience and engineering."

Right.

So this was the seed that he sowed, uh, in 2015, '16, and then there were several discussions on what we could do, something that's really puts India at the frontier, absolutely cutting edge, leading edge of this field. And then, so several ideas, we said, "Can we image the human brain at cellular resolution?"

Okay.

To give you a context, today we can see the human brain only at millimeter. Uh, the brain cells are about ten micron, 20 micron, and there are about a few hundred billions of them in the brain, and we have not seen them, right? It's one of the few organs which is... We've not even seen. So even the what part of the question is not answered, then the how part of the question, why part of the question comes.

Right.

And that's how this project got started. And today, this Brain Center, uh, has one of the most advanced technology platforms that can take in a human brain, a postmortem, uh, which is extracted in a, in a very, very delicate and a very, uh, high-quality manner, so that the cellular architecture and the connectivity inside the brain is preserved. And through a series of processes, which we'll perhaps talk about, uh, in a while, gets the entire map of the human brain.