Varanasi : Amar Jeet Yadav, a Doctoral Research Scholar in the School of Biochemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, has received the Young Scientist Award at the International Conference on Health and Agricultural Biotechnology: Interdisciplinary Trends (HABIT-2026), held from Oct 30 to Nov 1 at MNNIT Allahabad, Prayagraj. The award included a cash prize of Rs 5,000.
The event brought together more than 300 participants from academia and industry. The recognition was given for his research among presentations across six interdisciplinary conference themes. Yadav’s research aims to advance computational approaches for protein design and optimisation, with potential applications in healthcare, therapeutic development, and biotechnology. Shweta Kumari, a PhD research scholar from the same School, received the Second Best Poster Award in the category ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches in Health, Food, Agriculture and Environment. Her research focuses on the translational challenges of urinary tract infections by studying bacterial adhesin proteins involved in host-pathogen recognition. Using computational structural biology and structural bioinformatics, she investigates how combinatorial mutations affect adhesin structure, stability, dynamics, and recognition of host-associated glycans. Both scholars are working under the guidance of Aditya Kumar Padhi at the Laboratory for Computational Biology and Biomolecular Design, School of Biochemical Engineering, IIT-BHU. The laboratory focuses on computational biology, structural and translational bioinformatics, computational biophysics, biomolecular modelling and simulations, AI/ML-driven protein design and engineering, disease mechanisms, pathogen evolution, and predictive modelling for therapeutic discovery, with applications in healthcare and biotechnology.