Veronica Rodrigues 1953-2010 by K. VijayRaghavan, NCBS-TIFR Bangalore

Veronica Rodrigues, Senior Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) passed away in 2010 after a five year battle with breast cancer. Dr. Rodrigues was born in Kenya in 1953 where she attended the Dr Ribeiro Goan School. She joined Makerere University in Uganda but left during the turmoil there on a scholarship to study in Trinity College, Dublin, where she did her B. A. with Honours in Microbiology in 1976.

Stimulated by the scientific papers of P. Vijay Sarathy and Obaid Siddiqi on bacterial genetics, she wrote to Sarathy asking whether she could do her PhD with him. Sarathy, himself a PhD student, passed the letter on to Siddiqi who invited her immediately to join TIFR. With a strange British passport, which barred entry into Britain, Rodrigues landed in India in 1977, a country very new to her and about which she had a romantic and idyllic view. Siddiqi had moved his interests to neurogenetics and pioneered the study of olfaction in the fruitfly. Rodrigues was Siddiqiʼs first student in this new area. Her independent contribution in the study of olfactory behaviour was appreciated enough for her to be offered a regular position at TIFR even as a PhD student.

Rodrigues next spent three years at the Max-Planck Institute of Biologische Kybernetik in Tubingen. Here she pioneered the study of coding of olfactory information in the brain, one of her major contributions and a landmark study. Returning to her position at the TIFR Mumbai, Rodrigues moved into the study of the how the brain develops. Her group first charted out the rules that govern how smell and taste sensory neurons develop. Rodrigues and collaborators were the pioneers in this area as also in the study of the development of brain-regions where olfactory information is coded.

Rodrigues next combined her early training in physiology and behavioral biology by asking how the brain is made to encode behaviour and how it changes in response to experience in the real world. Research in the Rodrigues group, more recently, elegantly addressed questions on how individual nerve cells, which are often robust and stay alive through an animalʼs life, are plastic and can change their form and function upon environmental stimuli. In all these studies her ability to link molecular and cell biology to animal development and ultimately to behaviour has put her group as one of the major players in the neurobiology of olfaction. She unhesitatingly collaborated with the best anywhere. They were usually transformed to work on shared questions better than what would have been ever possible alone and each collaborator became a friend.

Ever generous with sharing credit, her leading role was often implicit but acknowledged by all. In scientific gatherings, where preening is not uncommon, her low-key style with high-quality work stood out. She worked extraordinarily hard to communicate her groupʼs science: As its head, that was not only her duty to her colleagues, but she realized the meaninglessness of good work unless it is written down well, published and communicated in seminars.

In parallel with her research successes, Rodrigues gently assumed many leadership roles, first at the Department of Biological Sciences (earlier the Molecular Biology Unit) at TIFR, helping to create an extraordinary intellectual environment. This was the crucible where the NCBS grew before it moved to Bangalore. Rodriguesʼs generous efficiency ensured that the fledgling NCBS had all the hospitality it needed in its early stages. Such incubations are often tense, but with Rodriguesʼs care, feathers were never ruffled and strong bonds were made to stay. Later, she became the Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences in TIFR Mumbai and in this role continued to ensure that new faculty had all the resources and independence they needed to allow their science to take off well. While very closely involved with NCBS through interactions with colleagues there, and as a member of it Management Board, Rodrigues resisted all invitations to move to Bangalore, fiercely loyal to her Department in Mumbai and in love with it beautiful location by the sea. Finally, she agreed to fully move to Bangalore in 2005 while still retaining strong links with Mumbai. At NCBS, Bangalore, along with her development of an excellent laboratory she revamped its meetings, workshops, student symposia and cultural programmes to make the campus thrive intellectually. Much of this was done behind the scenes and with little formal authority.

Rodrigues was demanding of others, a tough scientific critic who placed similar standards on herself. She inspired fierce loyalty and affection from all those who interacted with her, yet never hesitated in firmly telling her closest friends and collaborators what she thought. She held back no punches and none could charm her away from telling it as it was. Yet, her friendships withstood all lapses by others and her ability to work for others and the community were legendary. Sensitive to the failings and boorishness of a male-dominated scientific environment, she chose her company carefully and kept her distance from those who exemplified this culture. This, along with her dignified and scathing silence was usually effective in conveying her views.

Rodrigues became an Indian citizen, with much effort and difficulty, about 20 years after arriving here. While truly an internationalist she was always quietly proud of how much she had done for Indian science by doing what she loved: just doing a great job as a scientist, a mentor, a colleague, a leader and a friend. To the Tata Institute in particular and to India, she was every grateful for their generous support for basic science. She was persistent in her demands for our accountability, by doing excellent science and training the next generations, in reciprocation for this liberal support.

Veronica Rodrigues made a deep impression on all who interacted with her. Her departure leaves her family and friends empty, her imprint will last.

Veronica Rodrigues (from The Bumbling Biochemist)

Veronica Rodrigues (1953-2010) was an influential neuroscientist who helped cultivate and gain recognition of a thriving biosciences community in India. Despite being remembered as one of India’s greatest modern scientists, Rodrigues was born and raised in Kenya, entering India later as an adult and falling in love with the country. Rodrigues’ education spanned multiple continents – she began college at Makerere University in Uganda, but political turmoil led her to transfer her studies to Trinity College Dublin. At Trinity, in addition to a degree in Microbiology, she got a source of motivation that would set the path of her future career, although not in the way she expected.

When she read the papers of the Indian scientists P. Vijay Sarathy and Obaid Siddiqi, it was their work on bacterial genetics that excited her and drove her to write and ask to do her PhD with them. When she arrived at Obaid’s lab at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), however, she found that Obaid had shifted his research focus to neurogenetics, especially the molecular makeup of olfaction (the sense of smell). Rodrigues took up the subject with passion, making so much progress that she was offered a position at TIFR while she was still a student.

She spent several years in Tubingen, Germany’s Max-Planck Institute, where she pioneered research into the now-thriving field of olfactory coding (how the brain interprets smells) before returning to TIFR, where she expanded her research into how the neurons coding this information develop. Because her work was at the leading edge, she often had to develop new experimental techniques, many of which are currently used in labs around the world. She would likely have appreciated this global reach of her work, as she placed a strong emphasis on science communication and was always eager to collaborate.

It is fitting that, as a researcher of development, Rodrigues herself was instrumental in the development of the scientific institutions she worked at and the scientists she mentored. She became leader of the TIFR’s Molecular Biology unit, expanding it so much that it led to the development of a separate prestigious research institution in Bangalore, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), to which she would move towards the end of her much too short career. In addition to fostering the development of students in her own lab, she created and led a biennial neurobiology course at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, where she taught and mentored students from developing countries. Rodrigues died from breast cancer in 2010.