Meet the small-town college teachers in Stanford University’s list of top 2% scientists in the world

While packed with scientific minds from the country's premier educational institutes, the latest edition of Stanford-Elsevier list of the world’s top 2% scientists is also peppered with some names from the relatively less-exalted colleges and universities in the country.

The list includes a temporary teacher at a Nagpur college, teachers from small engineering colleges in tier-2 and 3 towns and affiliated to Anna University and Solapur University, and a botanist at a government college in Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir.

Working outside the well-oiled R&D machinery at the top institutes and within the constraints of their modest colleges, these academics made the cut thanks to their perseverance, help from funding agencies and out-of-the-box thinking. These scientists, who often had very humble beginnings, make the case for more inclusivity and sustained public and private support for scientific research in the country.

Earlier this week, the United States’ Stanford University and scientific publisher Elsevier released their annual list of top 2% scientists around the globe. The rankings, prepared on the basis of the composite index or ‘c-score’ metric of evaluating the quality and impact of research, features 6,239 scientists from India for their performance in calendar year 2024. As many as 3,372 researchers were recognised for their career-long contributions.

The rankings are dominated by researchers in the premier public and private institutes of the country – the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the National Institutes of Technology (NIT), the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) and the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). However, their peers from lesser-known institutes have also made their presence felt.

Sampath Boopathi, Muthayammal Engineering College

The single-year impact list of Indian scientists is topped by Sampath Boopathi, 45, a mechanical engineering professor at Muthayammal Engineering College at Rasipuram, a small town in the suburbs of Tamil Nadu’s Salem. The college is affiliated to Anna University.

Globally, Boopathi is ranked 288 (excluding self-citations) and 97 (overall citations) for his work in the sub-fields of materials and artificial intelligence and image processing. While he started his research work in manufacturing processes, he has since ventured into everything from artificial intelligence to circular economy, primarily reviewing existing research in these domains.

Son of daily wage labourers from a village in Salem district, Boopathi was educated in government schools, followed by various engineering colleges not far from his hometown. The key to his success was ‘self-motivation’. “I would always sit alone and think about tech-related ideas and put them to test. My institute has also encouraged me to pursue research activities,” he said.

Muthayammal Engineering College, Rasipuram (Image: official website)

The engineer’s highest cited paper is a 2013 publication based on his doctoral research, where he offered a safe and environment-friendly alternative to the liquid-based wire electrical discharge machining, a manufacturing technique. He has received a Rs 10 lakh grant from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) for this project. While he continued taking this work ahead, the prolific researcher has also published a large number of papers and book chapters on the use of artificial intelligence in agriculture, economic impact of electric vehicles and promoting sustainability education.

Boopathi explained that since his current institute has limited equipment available for original research in his area of expertise, he has focussed on secondary research. “As I am a reviewer at Elsevier, I have free access to its journals. I study the published papers and draw my conclusions, which are then reviewed and published as journal articles and book chapters,” he said.

The engineer aspires to work at more established institutes, but is hindered by their recruitment policies. “I have applied for funds from various agencies, but am yet to receive them. Those from Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) and other institutes are offered generous grants but they only hire IIT and NIT graduates. Hence, such opportunities are not available to me,” he rued.

Parvaiz Ahmad Ganie, GDC Pulwama

Parvaiz Ahmed Ganie, 50, a botanist teaching at the Government Degree College (Boys) at Jammu and Kashmir’s (J&K) Pulwama has been featured in the top 2% list for the last five years. In the latest edition, he has climbed up to the ninth spot among Indian researchers and at the 900th position globally. His name also figures in Stanford-Elsevier’s career-long impact rankings.

A Pulwama-native and alumnus of Sri Pratap College, Srinagar, Jamia Hamdard, IIT Delhi and International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biology (ICGEB), New Delhi, Ganie has taught at various degree colleges in J&K. However, his break came in 2015, when he got a scholarship to work at the King Saud University (KSU) in Saudi Arabia for five years.

Government Degree College, Pulwama (Image: official website)

Ganie primarily works in the domain of plant physiology and biology, with his research focussing on making the soil and plants resistant to natural calamities such as droughts, floods and rising temperatures. “I mainly work on agricultural plants such as peas, mustard, mulberry and tomatoes. Due to the reduction in fertile land, population increase and climate change, food production has suffered. Besides treating infertile soil, we make the plants resistant by acclimatising them to adverse conditions created in the laboratory. This is different from genetically modifying the plants,” he explained.

Working at a relatively small, government-run institute, Ganie’s main challenge is finding resources on time. “In Saudi Arabia, funding was never an issue -- everything I requested was delivered within 24 hours. Here we don’t get proper funding, even though we have fertile minds. Compared to the last 20 years, the funds are shrinking by the day,” lamented the scientist. GDC Pulwama is affiliated to the University of Kashmir.

One of the broad research areas Ganie has chosen for himself and his students is ‘Mitigation of Abiotic Stress/Heavy Metal Toxicity in Plants’, which involves containing the adverse impact of the accumulation of harmful metals such cadmium, chromium, mercury and lead on the metabolic activities of plants. The topic is then further broken down to individually study each of these metals at various institutes, with which he has ties. University of Kashmir, Srinagar, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar and Lovely Professional University, Phagwara are some of the universities where the botanist is running his projects.

Ganie still sometimes finds it difficult to be published in high-impact journals as they favour research on unique and less-explored topics. He keeps an eye out for emerging subjects of inquiry. For instance, he is working on the harms caused by materials such as vanadium and lithium, which were relatively recently found to be toxic. “Research on these elements is still in a nascent stage, but in future, their impact might become significant,” he said.

Chandrahasya Nandanwar, Nutan Adarsh College, Nagpur

Chandrahasya Nandanwar, 33, a young physicist from Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district who recently completed his PhD, has also made it to the list despite having only 37 Scopus-indexed papers to his name, which he began publishing in 2022. His work largely deals with luminescence study, with his research on using bismuth phosphate (BiPO4) to generate blue, orange, yellow, red and green coloured light receiving the highest number of citations.

It wasn’t an easy journey for Nandanwar. Son of a farmer belonging to the special backward class (SBC), Nandanwar studied at the local government school. He did his entire higher education at Nevjabai Hitkarini College, Bramhapuri, affiliated to Gondwana University, and has now been appointed as a temporary teacher at Nutan Adarsh College, Umred, Nagpur. It is affiliated to Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University.

Nevjabai Hitkarini College, Bramhapuri (Image: Official website)

His work was largely funded through a fellowship from the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Research & Training Institute (MAHAJYOTI), an autonomous body under the state government that aids research scholars from other backward classes (OBC).

“The fellowship is useful for full-time researchers like me. It allows us to use good-quality materials and attend academic conferences,” he said. He also credits his research guide and other professors for his achievement. “Others do research for the sole purpose of completing PhD. But I wanted to make a name for myself despite my humble background,” he said.

“The government should help us more. While I availed fellowship during PhD, there is no such aid available for post-doc. One needs connections to benefit from the government programmes. Otherwise, no one wants to help someone from a backward area,” he said.

Kutubuddin Kazi, BMIT Solapur

Hailing from a family of teachers, Kutubuddin Kazi, 45, wanted to be one himself. Hence, even after graduating as an electronics and telecommunication engineer from the Walchand Institute of Technology, a well-known college in Solapur, he began teaching instead of hunting for jobs in the industry. He subsequently completed his master’s and PhD over the next two decades to meet qualification requirements and for promotions.

However, the 45-year-old, who also made it to the top 2% scientist list, didn’t start research publication until 2022. He has only 17 Scopus-indexed academic articles listed against his name, one of the smallest counts on the list, though he said he has published many more that are yet to be indexed.

According to Kazi, who is currently the head of electronics and telecommunication department at Brahmdevdada Mane Institute Of Technology, Solapur, he started research activities in a concerted manner after enrolling for a post-doc at the Guwahati centre of US’s Eudoxia Research University. BMIT is affiliated to Solapur University.

He focuses on using internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) for agriculture, healthcare and some “atrangi” (quirky) purposes.

He claims to have developed systems to automatically detect and analyse certain ailments and conditions in heart, kidney and cancer patients and trigger actions such as calling a doctor or ambulance. He has also created new AI-based security approaches for IoT. Among his offbeat projects are lamps that glow when someone wants their loved one to know that they are thinking of them.

BMIT Solapur (Image: Official website)

However, his most-cited paper is an IoT-based ‘smart agriculture’ system that senses moisture in soil and light intensity to automatically switch on and off water supply and light in farms. Though admittedly “basic” research, it has helped propel Kazi among the elite scientists thanks to the rising interest in IoT and AI.

Like his peers at other not-so-prominent colleges, Kazi too struggles with raising funds. He says that he couldn’t take his healthcare research forward due to apprehension from hospitals and patients about sharing their data. “AI and machine learning depend on large datasets. “Industries should come forward to let us use their systems and databases,” he said.