At the Innovation Sprint, I would like to work on the peer review process.

The latest type of

peer review is double-blind peer review. Though the double-blind reviewing process is
attractive and considered to aid authors from underrepresented groups to publish their work
without any discrimination, it too has some inherent drawbacks. The major pitfall is that the
reviewers could still guess who the authors are from some metrics such as authors' self-
citations in the manuscript. I feel we must do something with the help of cutting-edge
technologists to address this issue. I believe Innovation Sprint as the right platform.

I just started my independent research career as an assistant professor at an Indian University.

I have been primarily working on soft membranous structures like polymer and lipid vesicles.
My latest publication was on osmotically induced membrane fission in artificial cells like
polymersomes. My expertise is in synthesizing molecular materials specifically soft
membraneous structures and utilizing several instrumental techniques of analysis, for
example, vibrational spectra, electron microscopy, optical microscopy, force microscopy, X-
ray diffraction. Though I do not have formal training in programming languages I had
worked with image J and MATLAB for my research. I have experience of the user interface
knowledge of some advanced instrumental techniques like spectroscopy and microscopy
required for scientific research. When I first got exposed to image J, the freely downloadable
software from NIH, I was amazed by its worth in my research and couldn't refrain from
appreciating the value of it as an open source platform. I have utilized it extensively to study
the wide-angle X-ray data for my layered samples. Overall, I have scientific research
experience in soft matter that displays properties akin to biological cells and I am continuing
to work on the same with help from open source data analysis platform

Innovation Sprint, I feel, is the platform that brings together researchers and technologists
and programmers to brainstorm ideas to transform the publishing field. This is cool because I
had never come across such a camp till now that brings people from different backgrounds
together to sit and do some productive work in two days that can address some of the
plaguing issues the publishing enterprise faces. I will gain a lot from the interactions with
people from backgrounds other than my own by discussing with them on how we can
mitigate the pitfalls in publishing such as, for example, in the peer review process.
Opportunities for future collaborations both from my background researchers and from other
backgrounds and even with programmers could start from here!

As Innovation Sprint brings together researchers and technologists and programmers and
designers to brainstorm ideas to transform the publishing field and make researchers' life
easier, I believe strongly that I will gain a lot from the interactions with people from
backgrounds other than my own by discussing with them on how we can mitigate the pitfalls
in publishing such as, for example, in the peer review process and address some of the
plaguing issues the researchers face in publishing. Opportunities for future collaborations
both from my background researchers and from other backgrounds and even with
programmers could start from here!
One of the major scientific questions that confront humanity is whether life exists beyond
Earth, which is again a consequence of the most fundamental question: How life originated
on the Earth. A basic set of properties that define something as life are self-replication,
metabolism, information transfer, evolution. One of the most intriguing properties of life is
self-replication where one cell divides into its daughter cells and the great missing link is how
it occurred from abiotic to biotic? We hypothesized polymer vesicles could undergo self-
replication inferring from experimental verification of their bending moduli and realized the
same. This was gratifying.