A return to Indian academia

This is my first blog post on the matter and it has been a long time coming. It's been 2.5 years since I moved back to India to start my research lab at IIIT Hyderabad. I will share some thoughts about my journey so far. 

Undergrad to PhD

I did 5 years of physics (integrated MSc) at IIT Kanpur where I developed an affinity for research through an undergraduate research project on analysis of musical waveforms using complex systems methods. In my final year, I took cognitive linguistics courses with Prof Achla Raina which sparked a deep desire to understand the human mind. A last minute decision to take the GRE was followed by 2 weeks of frantic studying and quickly sending in applications to several programs in linguistics, psychology, and a few in music technology. I got into Georgia Tech for a funded master's in music tech, a linguistics PhD program at Northwestern, and a psychology PhD program at Ohio State University. I opted for the latter, mainly because my to-be PhD adviser, Simon Dennis, came across as a very kind human being. He promised that we would play cricket and even responded to a mass email I had forwarded accidentally to him about an Avaaz.com petition to end world hunger. That response was a sure sign of how kind-hearted he was. Columbus was also the most affordable town of the lot and I had to support my wife and myself on a meager stipend. So these factors combined to make the decision easy for me. 

With my great pianist friend, Rahul Banerjee, at IIT Kanpur. 

With my friends in the 5 year MSc (integrated) physics program at IITK. Syed Mohammed Meesum, Sujan Dabholkar, Pronoy Sircar, and myself (L-R).

I had the most amazing time in grad school and it was here that I met David Huron, an influential music cognition researcher. I started spending a lot of time in his lab as well and further developed my musical skills by singing with the OSU symphonic choir and by taking piano lessons at the music school there. I also took courses from the computer science department. One particularly exciting experience was the graduate-level neural networks class taught by DeLiang Wang. DeLiang Wang made a lasting impression on me with his teaching style. It was an old-school black board and chalk class, but he had such clarity about concepts that when he geometrically illustrated things like gradient descent on the blackboard, they just stuck with me for a long time. I scored the top marks in the class and DeLiang Wang called Simon and told him that it was the first instance in a very long time that a non CS student had topped that course. It was probably the first course in my life that I sat in the front bench for and so it really taught me that a good teacher could bring a back bencher to the front bench. Experiences like these as a student inspired me to train to be a better teacher. As an aside, I just looked up DeLiang Wang's lab website and discovered that his lab is named "Perception and Neurodynamics Lab". I was not aware of it until now and it turns out that I named my lab "Memory and Neurodynamics Lab". 

CEMS 2010, one of the first conferences I attended in grad school. This is still my favorite conference but the last one I attended was probably in 2018. I hope to go back soon. 

The OSU Psychology dept had a huge introductory psych course that around 2000 students took at a time. So, they had to get us graduate students to teach sections of around 100 students each. They trained us during the summer, invited learning and education researchers to talk to us, and gave detailed feedback on our teaching every semester after visiting our classrooms while we taught. That again was a transformative experience that gave me excellent training on how to teach effectively. 

With my dear friend Rick and his co-workers. Rick took us in like his own family, gave us the keys to his car when we didn't have one, and took me to baseball games. Rick and his wife Teri are two of the most amazing people I've met. They embody true American kindness. 

The candidacy procedure at my home department is one of the best I've come across. I had to read ~100 papers and 6 textbooks over a span of 6-7 months and then my committee (4 professors including my new PhD adviser Per Sederberg, because Simon had to leave for his home country Australia to take up a full professorship) gave me a set of 12 questions that I had to answer in a week. I then defended those answers for a few hours in front of the panel. I mention this process here as I think it was at this point I really started being more confident about my knowledge of the field and felt like I would have something meaningful to contribute to it going forward. Both Simon and Per were kind and highly accomplished advisers, and both of them contributed significantly to my intellectual development in grad school. I once went to Simon and lamented that I could not compete with people who were publishing 2-3 Psych Review papers every year and he simply replied that I probably did more interesting things with my time than many of those people but that I had important things to contribute to the field regardless. I didn't need to be at an MIT to be able to contribute meaningfully. I heard similar advice from Per as I was contemplating on whether continuing on in academia was the right path for me. David Huron added some finishing touches to my intellectual makeup and I soon defended my dissertation and got one of the first postdoc positions I had applied for: in Kareem Zaghloul's lab at the NIH. 

Simon at the helm, with the rest of the lab steering him head first into dangerous waters, mirroring real life.

John O' Keefe, presenting a student's poster at SfN. His excitement was palpable, winning a Nobel prize did nothing to hamper that!

 

Watching the great Federer practice before the 2014 Cincinnati tournament.

PhD to Postdoc

Kareem's lab collected rare invasive neural recordings from humans. I am generally attracted to cool shit when it comes to academic pursuits. Single neuron recordings in humans is cool shit. After my job talk at the NIH, I was offered the position at the end of the day of my interview. Kareem too had one major rule: the candidate had to get along well with the rest of the lab. I passed the vibe check I guess, and they did for me as well. So again, the decision for me was fairly easy. Kareem was also just as great as my PhD advisers. In fact, it is when I trained in his lab that I truly understood what it meant to work hard, because everyone around me worked super hard! More importantly, I also understood that you could be at the top of your game while at the same time being respectful (contrary to tropes you may have heard about the most competitive research labs around the world). Kareem was always kind and understanding even during the lean patches, which continues to this date even though I'm seriously delayed in revising and sending my main postdoc paper back out for review. Kareem also had a certain kind of pure enthusiasm for neuroscience. Once, after a vacation, he called me to his office and talked excitedly about having sat at traffic lights and his thoughts about neural traveling waves and their functional role in the brain. He'd code up little simulations to illustrate his points. Since his medical duties took out a lot of his time, he used whatever opportunities he could get to code. He even coded up a bot to book his 4 am swimming appointments at the YMCA because those slots were hard to get. He'd share all this with us with child-like glee. 

I had an extremely productive period in the first three years of my postdoc. I started several projects, discarded a few after pilots didn't show great promise but completed data collection for two new projects, completed data analysis and submitted a preprint for one project with existing data, and completed around 80% of the analysis for another project, again with existing data. I also assisted with some other projects leading to a few co-authored papers and a smaller review paper. At some point, I sent in a random application to Google DeepMind for a Research Scientist position and was invited to interview. This hit me as a surprise, and I was interviewed right after I returned from a short vacation to Colorado and was grossly unprepared. So it went nowhere after the first couple of rounds of the interview when I was asked about sorting algorithms and computational complexity, all questions I could have answered with even minimal prep, that is how unprepared I was when submitting a random application because I didn't believe I would ever hear back! This was my first big lesson that my ideas were worth something (like most others, I suffer from regular bouts of imposter syndrome) as in my DeepMind job application, I cooked up an idea to train neural networks based on the traveling waves work I was doing in neuroscience. So it was an important lesson to never again half-ass a job application.   

During the last few years of my postdoc however, I got bogged down with a project that never seemed to end. I now think that it was because people in the field were not careful enough about some preprocessing choices, leading them to raise some questions about the results I had obtained (or rather, had failed to obtain given their prior work). I am still working on publishing those results due to the resistance I've faced from reviewers at a few glam journals. One rejection after major revisions at a glam journal read "This is a tour de force analysis but ..." and went on to lament the fact that I hadn't obtained glossy and clean behavioral results for the neural patterns that were the subject of our "tour de force" analysis. At this point, I knew I had to move on and seek an independent position because I was no longer having as much fun and it seemed like I had hit a dead end in many ways, due to no fault of the lab btw, but due to the circumstances surrounding that paper and the general uncertainty about the next step as a postdoc. I still very much enjoyed looking at intracranial data, so I continued to work on other projects like one on human cortical time cells but it felt like I had gotten stuck in some sort of vacuum or a rip current. My mental health went for a toss around this period. And then, Covid hit the world and my wife wanted to move back to India. Moving back to India was never on my list of things to aspire to because of concerns of safety, pollution, etc.  However, I gave in as soon as my daughter too voiced her opinion that she wanted to be closer to her grandparents in India and Covid really demonstrated the importance of family and close-knit social circles.

With my mom at the NIH clinical center, my place of work for 5.5 years. 

I sent in applications to some top Indian institutes. While some of them sent me interview invitations one year after I had already accepted a position (!!), 3 places interviewed me within a few weeks of sending in my application. The first one was a great interviewing experience and was the most comprehensive. I was ultimately unsuccessful but I enjoyed the 3 hour chalk talk and insights I got from the faculty there. The primary issue they had was that my research vision did not account sufficiently for roadblocks I was likely to hit in an Indian context. They also didn't seem fully convinced by the fact that my primary expertise was with intracranial EEG and yet I was proposing to do a lot of work with scalp EEG. All fair, but I'm hoping to prove that the latter is not much of a concern, and I have learned many lessons about the former very quickly and adapted fairly well. These are things you learn on the job pretty quickly but I guess they wanted people who had better foresight than I did at that point. Note that these interviews were all done online since it was during the Covid waves and I was still in the US trying to finish up my postdoc work. Doing a chalk talk online was pretty challenging but preparing for it really helped me better articulate my ideas which later went into grant applications. 

IIITH moved rapidly and offered me a position soon after my job talk, and asked me to accept within a few weeks. The other place had not gotten back to me at that point but had unofficially indicated interest. I decided to give Hyderabad a shot primarily because of geographical reasons and also because I got good vibes from the people I interacted with there. Just as an example, the director of IIITH spent 30 extra minutes after the interview chatting with me about piano and classical music. It seemed like they were interested in me not just as a faculty candidate but also as a person. So I communicated to the other place that I was going to accept the IIITH position. It's a bit funny that cricket and piano swayed my grad school and faculty application decisions, but these considerations have never led me astray, so I continue to use vibe-checks to make important life decisions even when onlookers may think these decisions are not what they'd have made in my place.

Assistant Professor, IIITH

I joined the institute in July, 2021. I've had a really pleasant time here so far. The vibe check didn't fail me, yet again. I get along really well with everyone around and even made some good friends in the short time I've been here. We have a very talented and technically skilled pool of undergraduates who drive much of our research. This allows me to use tools from areas such as NLP and computer vision (CV) for human memory research which is the focus of my lab.  For example, we just submitted a paper on what makes videos memorable to a top CV conference in collaboration with Makarand Tapaswi, who is sure to be a leader in his field soon. I have also established collaborations within cognitive science to work on topics like music memorability with Vinoo Alluri and the impact of covid on memory and other cognitive functions with Priyanka Srivastava. Special mention for Vinoo who was my faculty host during my job interview. She's batted for me right from the beginning. Most recently, she and Makarand both played a major role in giving me much needed feedback on a crappy first draft of a major grant application. So I have the privilege to work with highly accomplished and helpful faculty and students here. The PhD program needs a bit of work but the PG cell and RnD office are actively working on that. The cognitive science center, with 6 faculty members and their labs, serving around 100 research students at a time (undergraduate, masters, and PhD combined) is also one of the most active cognitive science research centers in India. 

Where I've felt constrained is infrastructure for neural data collection and not having funding support for recruiting more PhD students. With my colleagues, I tried to get a FIST grant in to get us an EEG lab, but the application was not successful. I also failed to get most grants I applied for and I submitted 6-7 applications in my first two years! With some agencies, I felt like they were not sending my proposals to the experts in my field, based on the short and inaccurate summary statements they sent me along with the rejection letter. I also feel like they tend to bean-count publications (e.g. # of first author publications in > a certain impact factor journals) without reading the proposal. I finally got a chance to interview at the final selection stages of a big fellowship. I don't know the result yet but I am optimistic. I will write another blog about it once the results are communicated. 

Here, I would be remiss if I do not mention the staff at IIITH. I've always gotten the help that I needed from them. Being a small institute also seems to help as we are able to get things done relatively quickly. For example, purchases have been relatively smooth given the stories I've heard from colleagues at bigger govt universities. As another example, I recently had invigilation duty with a staff member and we were casually chatting and the fellowship interview came up. He asked me how I planned to get there and I said I'd drive to the interview. He immediately told me that the institute would arrange a cab so that I'd be as stress-free as possible on the day of the interview. 

Two and a half years in, we have submitted a few papers and have several publications in the pipeline. It is amazing what one can do with a smart and diligent undergraduate student. Not everyone will have that drive of course but when they do, it is a rewarding experience. That said, my job is not to work with only the students with the best skills and drive. I took up this job to also contribute whatever I can to students' skill sets and career trajectories even when they don't come in as well-prepared as some of the others. So I find it especially exhilarating when someone who came in very unsure of their ability grows in confidence and starts achieving great results after being with the lab for a while. 

Life in India

Life in India takes getting used to, especially when you've spent 12 years in the US right after graduating college. I'll start off with some negatives but I'll say that overall, it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. 

I would not be painting an accurate picture if I leave out the areas that I found lacking. In the professional space, my major gripe is with people not being on time to meetings. Even when people ask me for input on their work, some of them turn up late or don't even show up. There's a simple way to deal with this: choose to work with people who share your professional values. I used to be extremely frustrated when this happened but I've learned to deal with it. Hyderabad in general also has a laid-back attitude, which suits me just fine, but can get annoying sometimes. The air quality is terrible at times and people drive like mad men. Most cars are completely dinged, mine has several dents on the right side mostly from cars and bikes swerving into it. Finally, the privileged behavior I see from some "high society" folks in our apartment community has been painful. Their attitudes get imprinted on their kids as well. This has led to my kid getting bullied. The bully's parents are also known to be bullies to their house-help and others. How people treat the security guards, apartment manager, and other people providing us essential services is disgusting to say the least. I used to smile and wave at the security guards but they thought I was doing it so that I could get them to salute me. I don't blame them because that is exactly what some people want them to do.

With my main cheer-leaders, my wife and kid! 

Now for the positives. For the privileged folks (like me), life in India comes with several perks. The best one is help for household chores. This frees up a lot of time which in the US was spent washing the dishes and vacuuming the apartment. I've been able to use this freed up time to focus on fitness. I've dropped 21-22 kgs since my peak weight of a whopping 111 kgs in 2018. Being in a better mental space of course was necessary for this to happen and setting up my research lab at a place that gave me a lot of freedom to do things my way was key. While I miss the fresh air and the national parks of the US, the sole fact that I could get my physical health on track after moving back to India makes up for all the good things I miss about the US. My family is much happier now that we are a few hours away by flight from them. Most importantly, both my wife and kid are quite happy with life in India so far. While I had doubts about how to get things done in the first year or so, the lab has started to produce some interesting work and I feel like there is a good path here to a fulfilling career. 

Top row: 2017-2018. Bottom row: 2023. 

Now, with this "return to India" story out of the way, I can start blogging about more interesting topics relevant to Indian academia: lessons related to funding, students, mental health, etc. We will also feature some blogs by graduating students and lab personnel.