Anand Ranganathan

Some Lesser Known Facts About Anand Ranganathan

• Until sixth grade, Anand Ranganathan was under his grandmother’s care, as his parents were busy with their careers.

• In 1992, he received the Cambridge Nehru Centenary Fellowship, a scholarship for graduate studies.

  

• He also received the Pembroke College Cambridge Scholarship in 1995.

• From 1998 to 1999, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry department at the University of Cambridge.

• He returned to India in 1999 and joined the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Delhi as the staff research scientist in the Recombinant Gene Products Group, where he worked for 16 years, i.e., till 2015.

• He wrote his first book, The Land of the Wilted Rose (2012), a fiction about a seventeen-year-old Indian Maharaja.

  

• In 2015, he joined as an associate professor at the Special Center for Molecular Medicine (SCMM) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi.

• He authored, For Love and Honour, in 2015 and co-authored, The Rat Eater, with Chitra Subramaniam in 2019.

• Since 2019, he has been a professor at the Special Center of Molecular Medicine, JNU.

• His scientific research is about the direct evolution, pathogenesis, and therapy, specifically of Malaria and Tuberculosis diseases.

  

• He has several peer-reviewed articles about his different research topics.

• In 2020, the team led by Prof. Dr. Ranganathan in collaboration with the team from Shiv Nadar University in Delhi, led by Shailaja Singh and Nishant Joshi, invented codon-shuffling, a novel therapy for treating Malaria.

  

• He suffered a heart attack in 2021 and according to him, it was caused due to his prolonged smoking habit.

  

• He drew inspiration from actress Raveena Tandon to write his next fiction, Soufflé (2023), a murder mystery.

  

• He has also published non-fiction books, such as Hindus in Hindu Rashtra: Eighth-Class Citizens and Victims of State-Sanctioned Apartheid (2023).

• As a protest, he cancelled his contract with Bloomsbury Publications in publishing the book, India’s Forgotten Scientists which he co-authored with his wife, Sheethal Ranganathan. He expressed his objection to Bloomsbury Publication for backing off from publishing the controversial book Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story by Monika Arora, Prerna Malhotra, and Sonali Chitalkar, due to political pressure.

• He has written articles on social, religious, and political issues on his website and other news websites, such as the Newslaundry, DNA, and The News Minute.

• He was the columnist of the media organisation, Newslaundry, from its launch in 2012 till 2018. He wrote articles, doodled, conducted interviews, and appeared on its weekly podcast, NL Hafta. He also did a segment called Ranga Uncle’s Nichod, on its YouTube Channel.

  

• He had a fallout with Newslaundry when some of its employees mocked his tweets or opinions in the published articles and the management never interfered.

• He is the consulting editor and writer of the Swarajya Magazine.

• He is popular as a political analyst and appears on debates conducted by news channels on various political scenarios in the country.

• He claims to have a neutral political outlook with no preferences for right-wing or left-wing.

• As of May 2024, he has published 31 research articles in national and international journals, such as The Journal of Biological Chemistry and The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

• Even as an atheist, he often visits temples and terms his religious view as ‘Darwinian atheism.’

  

• He gave a TEDx speech on Fighting Tuberculosis Through Directed Evolution at a TEDx event at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law (RGNUL) in Punjab and another at Xavier Institute of Management (XIMB) in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha on To Kill a Mocking Bug: Darwin to the Rescue.