Dr CS Reddy, third from left, with his thesis commitee, and officials from Manipal and Réunion University

The first dual student between the Université de la Réunion and Manipal University-NCBS, Mr. Chilamakuri Chandra Sekhar Reddy, recently defended his Ph.D. thesis. A student of Prof. R. Sowdhamini at NCBS (part of TIFR), his success follows from a three-way MOU established in 2005 between NCBS, Manipal University (Manipal, India) and a French university, Université de la Réunion (Réunion Island, France). This MOU was set up to facilitate collaborative research in the emerging areas of computational biology. It was designed  to allow for dual studentship, and involves an enhanced twinning programme, including student visits and a Ph.D. degree awarded from the two universities.

Chandra Sekhar spent two years working with his other thesis supervisor, Dr. Bernard Offmann in his laboratory in Réunion Island. He took his thesis defense examination, on 30th November 2009, abiding to the administrative rules of both Universities. According to French University rules, a French professor (Prof. Franck Molina from CNRS, Montpellier, France) was present during the defense examination as an external examiner in addition to the Indian external examiner, Dr. Nagasuma Chandra of Indian Institute of Science. Both thesis supervisors, Prof. R. Sowdhamini (NCBS) and Dr. Bernard Offmann (Dean of Université de la Réunion, Réunion Island, France) were present for this occasion. According to the French system, a jury consisting of all these people and the thesis committee members (Prof. N. Srinivasan, Indian Institute of Science and Dr. Yamuna Krishnan of NCBS) was constituted and chaired by Prof. Frederic Cadet, the ex-President of Université de la Réunion. The thesis defense included detailed presentation of the bioinformatics research work completed by Mr. Reddy during the last 5 years, on the computational detection of distant relationships between gene products and protein domain families and the modelling of resistin. At the end of the examination, the jury chair solemnly declared that Chandra Sekhar Reddy would receive his Ph.D. degree with the highest grade according to the French system.