JEE AIR 1 returned to IIT Kanpur inspired by Swades, now studies brain of a mosquito

There is a fantasy with IITians in India. An IITian tag could take you to anywhere, from an ISRO scientist to a founder of a startup. Already thousands of scientists who came from IITs are contributing widely in NASA and in top Silicon Valley firms, including Oracle, Intel and Microsoft. A handful, however, show the zeal to choose what Nitin Gupta, AIR 1 in 2000, chose.

After completing his degree in computer science from IIT Kanpur, the premier institute of India, he moved to the University of California, San Diego. Even after that, he did not feel satisfied, and working for some MNC was not on his plate. He returned to India in 2014 and joined IIT Kanpur as a professor.\

Now he is studying the brains of mosquitoes, trying to understand how does a brain distinguish between what is worth pursuing and what must be escaped, without having learnt the lesson before?

A Swades-like moment came in his life, and, as he says, it was the film itself that inspired him to return to India.

But the return was not merely a return to the country. It was also a departure from the road that had been laid before him.

IIT Kanpur records the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award in 2015, the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Fellowship in 2016, the Swarnajayanti Fellowship in Life Sciences in 2021, the CNR Rao Faculty Award in 2022 and the S Ramchandran National Bioscience Award in 2023. In 2025, he was named to the Joy Gill Chair and received an Excellence-in-Teaching Award from IIT Kanpur.FROM AIR 1 TO FACULTY IN THE SAME COLLEGE

Nitin Gupta stood first in the IIT-JEE in 2000. He entered IIT Kanpur to study Computer Science and graduated in 2004 with a B.Tech. degree. The usual road lay before him: a career in technology, perhaps a large company, perhaps Silicon Valley.

An interest in biology, which had been growing quietly during his years at IIT, took him to the University of California, San Diego. There he pursued a PhD in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, completing it in 2009. His work lay at the meeting of computation and biology, in the study of proteins and genomes.

After his doctorate, Gupta spent several months in a cognitive neuroscience laboratory at UC San Diego, studying how an impulse for food or money finds expression in the motor system before a person acts upon it.

From 2010 to 2014, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health, where he turned to electrophysiology—the study of the electrical activity of neurons. The computer scientist was, by degrees, becoming a neuroscientist.

In July 2014, he returned to India.

He joined IIT Kanpur's Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering as a faculty member. He had left the Institute as a student of computers. He returned as a student of the brain.

The choice was not without an alternative.THE SWADES MOMENT FOR AN IITian

Gupta has said that, on returning from America, he had two roads before him: industry or research. Industry offered the market; research, greater freedom. He chose research. He had spent years abroad, yet he says he had always meant to return to India.

At IIT Kanpur, his work took him deeper into neuroscience. His laboratory studies the circuits by which the brain receives smells and turns them into behaviour. Grasshoppers, flies and mosquitoes serve as its subjects; electrophysiology, histology, behavioural experiments, genetic manipulation and computational modelling its instruments.

The question is simple, though the answer is not: how does a brain know what to approach and what to avoid, before experience has taught it the difference?

For this, Gupta studies the insect olfactory system—the machinery by which an insect receives and interprets smell.

The mosquito is a useful subject. It does not merely detect an odour; it must make something of it. A human body releases a mixture of chemical signals, some of which help the mosquito find its host and others which may cause it to turn away.

Between the detection of a chemical and the movement that follows lies the work of the nervous system.THE LABORATORY THAT IS STUDYING THE BRAIN OF MOSQUITO

Gupta's laboratory has studied the antennal lobe, a region of the mosquito brain where olfactory information is processed. In a 2023 paper in Nature Communications, Gupta and his collaborators examined how individual odours are represented by neurons in the antennal lobe of Aedes aegypti. They combined intracellular electrophysiology with morphological reconstruction and immunohistochemistry to examine the neurons and their connections.

The mosquito thus becomes a small instrument for studying a larger question: how does electrical activity in the nervous system become behaviour?

His laboratory has also examined why neural connections may differ from one insect to another while their responses to odours remain orderly. The brain, it appears, need not be wired in exactly the same fashion in every individual to produce a reliable response.

The work has since extended to neuromodulation—the manner in which an insect's internal state alters the way its olfactory system responds. More recent work has considered how a female mosquito's attraction to human odours changes after a blood meal.

Thus, the man who entered IIT Kanpur to study computers now spends part of his working life studying what happens inside a mosquito's brain when it encounters the smell of a human.

But the mosquito is only one part of the work.

Gupta's group helped develop TreadWill, an automated cognitive behavioural therapy programme intended for people who have limited access to therapists.

In a randomised trial involving 598 participants in India, those who completed at least half of the programme showed reductions in symptoms of depression and anxiety compared with the waitlist group.

The two subjects may seem far apart - a mosquito searching for a host and a person dealing with depression. Yet both lead to the same question: how does a nervous system receive information, make sense of it and turn it into action?

Gupta's own path has followed much the same course.

Computer science led to bioinformatics; bioinformatics to neuroscience; neuroscience to the electrical activity of neurons and, eventually, to the small circuits inside an insect's brain.

The awards have accumulated along the way.

But the awards tell only a part of the story.

When ThePrint examined the careers of twenty IIT-JEE toppers between 2000 and 2019, twelve were working outside India. Gupta was among those who returned.

His return, however, was not to the discipline in which he had first made his name. He did not return to build a technology company or join an industry laboratory.

He returned to IIT Kanpur to study the brain.

How does a brain know what to do?- Ends