
Scientist, Associate Professor @NCBS_bangalore, @NCBStheory and @ictstifr Bangalore — Toronto — Göttingen — Princeton — Bangalore
Bengaluru, India
Joined July 2012
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Protocells from three inorganic salts, some formaldehyde and water?
They grow? They synthesise organic molecules of core biomolecular classes: amino acids, sugars, lipid-like motifs?
And, there are similar structures in today's oceans?
Yes! Read on.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11013
Looking forward to catching up with a lot of old friends/colleagues at the 2027 Gordon Research Conference on Stochastic Physics in Biology -- grc.org/stochastic-physics-i…
I'll be talking about something that has kept us very busy and excited about for the last year or so
Protocells from three inorganic salts, some formaldehyde and water?
They grow? They synthesise organic molecules of core biomolecular classes: amino acids, sugars, lipid-like motifs?
And, there are similar structures in today's oceans?
Yes! Read on.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11013
The video of the talk (there are some slide visibility issues until about 7.5 minutes of the video, after which it seems fine) -- youtube.com/live/9u38Ao_vspo…
I feel very honored and excited to be giving a Kaapi with Kuriosity lecture this Sunday, which happily coincides with the 10th anniversary (to the month!) of the series that has been an amazing collaboration between the @ictstifr and the @JNPlanetarium
icts.res.in/outreach/kaapi-w…
I feel very honored and excited to be giving a Kaapi with Kuriosity lecture this Sunday, which happily coincides with the 10th anniversary (to the month!) of the series that has been an amazing collaboration between the @ictstifr and the @JNPlanetarium
icts.res.in/outreach/kaapi-w…
"He may have invented one of neuroscience’s biggest advances. But you’ve never heard of him"
statnews.com/2016/09/01/opto…
#nobelprize #nobel #optogetics
Shashi Thutupalli retweeted
We have found stable singularity on 3D Euler!
anima-ai.org/2026/09/07/stab…
Our starting point is a physics-informed neural network (PINN) to come up with an approximate answer, and then to argue stability around that to complete the proof.
The challenge so far has been that PINNs have not been successful in discovering singularities on the current problem. A common failure mode is PINNs converging to a trivial solution. We take special care to nudge our PINN to interesting regions through a combination of constraints, and we believe this is a novel way of making PINNs work for such hard optimization problems.
We also carry out a detailed study of the transport field of our approximate profile, and show it has promising properties of local outgoing flow, essential for proving linear damping, which is an important ingredient of overall stability.
We believe that such physics-informed and physics-centric AI are critical ingredients across many areas of research involving physical systems, and LLMs lack such physical grounding.
We have been working on this problem for much of this year, and we just saw the announcement by Tristan on Euler with forcing. In contrast, we consider without forcing and use a PINN formulation. @Caltech
Feynman, in his Lectures on Physics, describes how "physicists always have a habit of taking the simplest example of any phenomenon and calling it 'physics,' leaving the more complicated examples to become the concern of other fields."
What, then, is the physics of life?
And given the complexity, where do we even begin?
I start with these questions today at the Physics Department of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where I will give the Brahmagupta Colloquium — physics.iitm.ac.in/events/ev….
Mathematical Discourse (mathematicaldiscourse.org/): in the words of Terence Tao is "a new online, peer-reviewed mathematics journal, publishing videos of mathematics research talks of the highest quality".
Like this idea very much, hope the Sciences pick it up soon.
Shashi Thutupalli retweeted
Physics is going to be as cooked/cooking as math. I fed Claude an open problem in stochastic thermodynamics of the kind I'd suggest to a mathematically inclined grad student. And over a few days of back and forth, it did months of work and closed the whole problem class.
Shashi Thutupalli retweeted
ಇದೇನೋ? ಅದಾನೆ. ಇದೂನೇ? ಅದೇನೆ.
ನನ್ನಾಣೆ? ಅದಾನೆ. ನಿನ್ನಾಣೆ? ನನ್ನಾನೆ.
ಅದಾನೆ, ನನ್ನಾನೆ, ಮದಾನೆ, ಮುದ್ದಾನೆ.
ನೆನ್ನೇನೂ? ಅದಾನೆ. ಇಂದೂನು, ಎಂದೂನು.
ಎಡಕ್ಕೂ? ಬಲಕ್ಕೂ? ಒಳಕ್ಕೂ? ಹೊರಕ್ಕೂ?
ಅದಾನೆ ಅದಾನೆ ಅದಾನೆ ಅದಾನೆ.
ಹಿಂದೇನೂ ಮುಂದೇನೂ ಅದಾನೆ, ಅದಾನೆ.
ಹಿಂದೂನೇ? ಮು... ಅ ದಾ ನೆ, ಅ ದಾ ನೆ!
ಇದ್ಯಾವ ವ್ಯಥೇನೇ!
Shashi Thutupalli retweeted
Congrats Nayan and @stpalli. Wonderful evening at the annual @SynTalk dinner with the awarding of the SynTalk Medal. More power to you, Jyoti and Rajat, to keep this going!
It’s triply rewarding when your PhD student is recognised.
Hearty congratulations to Nayan Chakraborty for being awarded the 2026 @SynTalk Medal for his PhD thesis work.
It’s triply rewarding when your PhD student is recognised.
Hearty congratulations to Nayan Chakraborty for being awarded the 2026 @SynTalk Medal for his PhD thesis work.
We had a nice, cozy celebration for L Mahadevan's (@Mahadevan_Lab) 60th birthday at @ictstifr today -- icts.res.in/discussion-meeti….
Given our mutual love for Sanskrit, I wrote him a little verse in celebration.
We’re looking for postdocs to join our interdisciplinary group at the @NCBS_Bangalore
Please retweet and help get the word out.
——
Are you interested in how chemistry transitions to biology — the origins-of-life problem?
We have some recent work on this problem and we are excited by the possibilities. From an aqueous mixture of three salts and formaldehyde we get protocells. More about the work are in the thread below ⬇️
We are looking for creative scientists with skilful hands and analytical minds to continue the work.
Are you a chemist with analytical (particularly NMR and/or Mass Spectrometry) skills in exploring the biomolecular diversity this system is producing — amino acids, peptides, lipids and more?
Are you a materials scientist/experimental physicist interested in understanding the self assembly and self organisation mechanisms of this system?
Please reach out if you think you are well suited for this — [email protected] with your CV and a short write up about why this interests you.
Protocells from three inorganic salts, some formaldehyde and water?
They grow? They synthesise organic molecules of core biomolecular classes: amino acids, sugars, lipid-like motifs?
And, there are similar structures in today's oceans?
Yes! Read on.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11013
Yeasts in liquid nitrogen. Now out @eLife
elifesciences.org/reviewed-p…
We exposed yeast to -196 C freeze-thaw (without cryoprotectants) and interesting things happened -- the survival went up from about 1% to close to 80% in just 25 cycles!
The preprint is out and feedback is highly welcome -- biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…













