Suryanarayan Biswal (Assistant Professor)

Surya earned his Master’s in Life Sciences from NIT, Rourkela, followed by a PhD in Neuroscience from the Defence Institute of High Altitude Research, DRDO, Leh-Ladakh, India, under the supervision of Dr. Sunil Kumar Hota. His doctoral research focused on understanding the physiological and cognitive dysfunctions experienced by high-altitude sojourners, particularly the armed forces stationed at high-altitude regions. He explored the hypothesis of precocious ageing due to prolonged exposure to hypobaric hypoxia, providing a new perspective to his lab’s research by investigating neuronal plasticity-induced survival strategies under chronic stress conditions. 

With an aim to further pursue his deep interest in neuroscience, Surya joined Prof. Sumantra Chattarji's lab at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bangalore, India, for postdoctoral research. Working in a collaborative project with the University of Edinburgh and McGill University, Canada, he studied platform-based behavioral phenotyping of novel transgenic rat models for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This work involved a battery of behavioral tasks to characterize specific phenotypes in the transgenic rat models, including Pten+/-, Ctnap2+/-, Cdkl5-/Y, Fmr1-/Y, Syngap+/-, Grin2b-/Y, Arid1b+/-, and Dyrk1a+/-, focusing on traits associated with autism such as novelty-induced anxiety, perseverative behavior, social novelty and sociability, learning and memory, emotional memory, motor coordination, and sensory hypersensitivity. During his research tenure here, Surya standardized several aspects of the methods used for behavioral phenotyping, including social co-occupancy (Tube co-occupancy test-TCOT), syllable development, and ultrasonic vocalization (USV) analysis during juvenile play behavior.

In November 2022, Surya joined the Department of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, India, as an Assistant Professor. In this role, he aims to investigate the molecular, cellular, and circuit-level mechanisms underlying social and emotional behavioral abnormalities.