Dr. Nikhil R. Gandasi

Dr. Nikhil R. Gandasi completed his bachelor's and master's in Biochemistry from the University of Mysore, India, in 2007 with a career award. He moved to Sweden to study the mechanisms of insulin secretion under the guidance of Sebastian Barg at Uppsala University, where he used high-resolution live cell imaging to understand various steps of the insulin granule life-cycle leading to insulin exocytosis, culminating in his PhD in 2015.

His work was recognized with the Young Investigator Award from the Scandinavian Society for Study of Diabetes. Dr. Gandasi continued his work on beta cells from human donors to understand secretory defects in insulin secretion mechanisms leading to type-2 diabetes. He was funded by the EFSD/Lilly grant (now called the EFSD/Lilly Young Investigator Award Programme) and Svenska Sällskapet för Medicinsk Forskning (SSMF). His findings were published in three separate articles in the *Journal of Clinical Investigation*, *Diabetes*, and *Cell Metabolism*.

In 2018, Dr. Gandasi was recognized with the EFSD Rising Star Award Programme, which honors young investigators with the highest potential in Europe working on diabetes. He is currently supported by NovoNordisk Young Investigator Grants and Strategic Grants from Sweden, which are used for collaborations with industry to develop diagnostic tools for monitoring diabetes.

Dr. Gandasi was awarded the Early Investigator Award in Chromaffin Cell Biology at the Chromaffin Cell Biology Meeting in 2020. He has been teaching for 10 years and is highly acclaimed by his students. He currently leads a course on techniques in cell biology aimed at PhD students and has supervised several bachelor’s and master’s thesis students, in addition to co-supervising PhD students and postdocs.

He is also mentoring several bachelor’s and master’s students from India to pursue academic research. Dr. Gandasi is currently collaborating with renowned scientists in islet biology, including Prof. Patrik Rorsman at the University of Gothenburg and Oxford. In 2022, he started his own research group in the Department of Developmental Biology and Genetics (DBG) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as an Assistant Professor.

He has received various grants from DBT, ICMR, and DST, and was awarded the Young Investigator Award from Infosys. Dr. Gandasi is mentoring six PhD students to understand the role of the islet environment and how it is altered during type-2 diabetes using advanced cell biology tools.