Geetha Patil
ANDOVER MA: The Diaspora Of Scientists from India (DOSTI) hosted its first official get together at Andover, MA, with close to hundred of top level-scientists gathering and thereby ensuring that the meet grand success.
The concept of DOSTI was proposed by the group of Indian scientists a few years ago. The vision of DOSTI is to promote fellowship among scientists and technologists; provide mentorship for their careers in academic institutions, pharmaceutical, and biotech industries.
It is also to nurture young generations in STEM fields and augment them with the latest trends in the biopharmaceutical industry. The primary mission is to unify, nurture, and inspire scientists from the Indian subcontinent.
The convener of the program, Dr. Ganesh Prasanna, welcomed all the members and the special guests and announced the policy of DOSTI which is ‘do NOT share any proprietary information’ about any company at any circumstances.
Dr. Pramod Pandey, Advisor, and Outreach Coordinator, introduced the Founding Leadership Team members with a brief description of their roles to the audiences. Dr. JagdishTewari, the President, narrated his story of how the idea of building the DOSTI group came to his mind at first and discussed with Dr. NishanthGopinathan, the Vice President who presented the vision and mission statements.
Dr. Neelaabh Shankar, General Secretary, talked about the objectives of DOSTI with some illustrations to the audiences. Dr. Jaya Goyal, the Head of Women’s Affairs, spoke about how DOSTI is going to provide a supportive environment to the empowerment of women to play their roles as equals and leaders in and outside of DOSTI Organization. Dr. Raj Nagaraja, Head of Youth Affairs, discussed ideas to nurture younger generations interested in STEM fields. Dr. Pramod Pandey talked about how to share the high-level responsibilities among the members and how we can meet the objectives of DOSTI through forming active subcommittees of the members according to their interests and expertise in those areas.
Dr. Dinesh Bangari, Joint Secretary/Treasurer, organized a Breakout session moderated, namely Dr. Ketki Hatle and Dr. Sriram Rajgopalan. All the members were asked to choose their interest group out of the three main groups, namely: 1) Mentoring, guidance, and career advice, 2) Organizational sustainability and engagements, 3) Youth/student engagement and empowerment. Dr. Promod Pandey, Dr. Jagdish Tewari, and Dr. Nishanth Gopinathan presented some short & long-term plans and answered all the questions of the audiences.
Also, Dr. Sriram Rajgopalan thanked all the members for coming and actively participating in the event. He thanked all the founding team members for their support and time. Lastly, he thanked all other supportive members of the event by mentioning their names and services provided behind and during this event.
