# Ganesh Bagler

Ganesh Bagler is known for his research in computational gastronomy, an emerging data science of food, flavors and health. By blending food with data and computation he has helped establish the foundations of this niche area. Starting with the investigation of food pairing in the Indian cuisine, his lab has contributed to computational gastronomy with studies on culinary fingerprints of world cuisines, culinary evolution, benevolent health impacts of spices, and taste prediction algorithms.

## Education

Ganesh Bagler was born and raised in Solapur, Maharashtra, where he completed his schooling at Sharada School and Siddheshwar High School,Solapur in the western peninsular Indian state of Maharashtra. He pursued a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree in Physics from Sangameshwar College, affiliated with Shivaji University, graduating in 1997. Bagler continued his academic journey at the University of Hyderabad, earning a Master of Technology (M.Tech.) in Computational Techniques. He later joined the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) for his doctoral studies, where his Ph.D. research focused on the application of graph theoretical models to protein structures. His work contributed to the understanding of assortative mixing in these models, a key observation in the field of Computational Biology. Bagler's diverse academic background laid the foundation for his pioneering work in Computational Gastronomy.

## Career

Ganesh Bagler's career blends academic research, teaching, and pioneering efforts in Computational Gastronomy. After earning his Ph.D. from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, where he focused on graph theoretical models of protein structures, Bagler completed postdoctoral research in computational neuroscience at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. He then worked at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Prof. Michael Lappe's (Otto Warburg Laboratory, Bioinformatics/Structural Proteomics) group in Germany on bioinformatics and structural proteomics. Returning to India, Bagler joined the CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology as a scientist before moving to the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur as an assistant professor and later the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology. He eventually joined Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-Delhi), where he holds a tenure-track position. There, he is affiliated to the Center for Computational Biology and Department of Computational Biology and has been developing the Computational Gastronomy niche in his lab, the Complex Systems Laboratory.

## Research

Ganesh Bagler's research has been rooted in investigation of complex systems, primarily of biological origin: protein structure-function, kinetics, folding, and design; complex network models transportation systems; molecular interactome models of complex diseases; controllability of biological networks; in silico drug discovery;systems biological investigation of brain networks; modeling and prediction of phenotypic side effects of drugs; computational models of biological systems; and computational gastronomy.

## Science communication and outreach

Ganesh Bagler has keen interest in STEM (sience, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and public outreach for communicating science. He has been engaged in propagating the cause of leveraging computational gastronomy for data-driven food innovations on various platforms: TEDx; HasGeek's Kilter 2017; Discussion Meeting on Mathematical and Statistical Explorations in Disease Modeling and Public Health at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences; 7th IFCA International Chefs Congress; IIT Guwahati Research Conclave 2017; GD Goenka University Le Cordon Bleu India's iHOST 2017; Cadence Advanced Technology Talk; 2nd International Meeting on Systems Medicine (Utrecht, Netherlands); Food Safety and Standards Authority of India's (FSSAI) EatRight Mela; Bangalore Science Forum; and SIAL Paris Conference 2019. He has organized five editions of Computational Gastronomy Symposiums at IIIT-Delhi. He conducts the 'Open Computational Gastronomy' course on Google Classroom

## Controversy

In April 2015, soon after his research reporting the food pairing investigation of Indian cuisine was touted as an emerging technology by the MIT Technology Review, Bagler was unceremoniously removed from the position of assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur in a controversial decision. The students protested against the decision of termination. Ministry of Human Resource Development constituted a three-member committee for the investigation of the matter. Subsequently, Bagler moved to Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology on a tenure track position and has graduated his PhD students from Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. He has been tenured and promoted to the position of Professor at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology.

## Selected bibliography

* Ganesh Bagler; Somdatta Sinha (2005). "Network Properties of Protein Structures". Physica A. 346 (1–2): 27–33. arXiv:q-bio/0408009. Bibcode:2005PhyA..346...27B. doi:10.1016/j.physa.2004.08.046. S2CID 9539809.
* Ganesh Bagler; Somdatta Sinha (2007). "Assortative mixing in Protein Contact Networks and protein folding kinetics". Bioinformatics. 23 (14): 1760–1767. arXiv:0711.2723. Bibcode:2007Bioin..23.1760B. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm257. PMID 17519248.
* Ganesh Bagler (2008). "Analysis of Airport Network of India as a complex weighted network". Physica A. 387 (12): 2972–2980. arXiv:cond-mat/0409773. Bibcode:2008PhyA..387.2972B. doi:10.1016/j.physa.2008.01.077. S2CID 119387720.
* Arun Kumar; Som Dutt; Ganesh Bagler; Paramvir Singh Ahuja; Sanjay Kumar (2012). "Engineering a thermostable superoxide dismutase functional at sub-zero to >50°C, which also tolerates autoclaving". Scientific Reports. 2: 387. Bibcode:2012NatSR...2..387K. doi:10.1038/srep00387. PMC 3339387. PMID 22548128.
* Shivalika Pathania; Vinay Radhawa; Ganesh Bagler (2013). "Prospecting for novel plant-derived molecules of Rauvolfia serpentina as inhibitors of Aldose Reductase, a potent drug target for diabetes and its complications". PLOS ONE. 8 (4): e61327. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...861327P. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0061327. PMC 3629236. PMID 23613832.
* Anupam Jain; NK Rakhi; Ganesh Bagler (2015). "Analysis of food pairing in regional cuisines of India". PLOS ONE. 10 (10): e0139539. arXiv:1505.00890. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1039539J. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0139539. PMC 4592201. PMID 26430895.
* Bagler, Ganesh; Singh, Navjot (2018). "Data-Driven Investigations of Culinary Patterns in Traditional Recipes Across the World". 2018 IEEE 34th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (ICDEW). pp. 157–162. arXiv:1803.04343. doi:10.1109/ICDEW.2018.00033. ISBN 978-1-5386-6306-6.
* Neelansh Garg; Apurup Sethupathy; Rudraksh Tuwani; Rakhi NK; Shubham Dokania; Arvind Iyer; Ayushi Gupta; Shubhra Agrawal; Navjot Singh; Shubham Shukla; Kriti Kathuria; Rahul Badhwar; Rakesh Kanji; Anupam Jain; Avneet Kaur; Rashmi Nagpal; Ganesh Bagler (2018). "FlavorDB: A database of flavor molecules". Nucleic Acids Research. D1 (D1): D1210 – D1216. doi:10.1093/nar/gkx957. PMC 5753196. PMID 29059383.
* Anupam Jain; Ganesh Bagler (2018). "Culinary evolution models for Indian cuisines". Physica A. 503: 170–176. arXiv:1505.00155. Bibcode:2018PhyA..503..170J. doi:10.1016/j.physa.2018.02.176. S2CID 16910527.
* Rakhi NK; Rudraksh Tuwani; Jagriti Mukherjee; Ganesh Bagler (2018). "Data-driven analysis of biomedical literature suggests broad-spectrum benevolence of culinary herbs and spices". PLOS ONE. 13 (5): e0198030. Bibcode:2018PLoSO..1398030R. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0198030. PMC 5973616. PMID 29813110.
* Vandana Ravindran; Jose C. Nacher; Tatsuya Akutsu; Masayuki Ishitsuka; Adrian Osadcenco; V. Sunitha; Ganesh Bagler; Jean-Marc Schwartz; David L. Robertson (2019). "Network controllability analysis of intracellular signalling reveals viruses are actively controlling molecular systems". Scientific Reports. 9 (1): 2066. Bibcode:2019NatSR...9.2066R. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-38224-9. PMC 6375943. PMID 30765882.
* Rudraksh Tuwani; Nutan Sahoo; Navjot Singh; Ganesh Bagler (2019). "Computational Models for the Evolution of World Cuisines". 2019 IEEE 35th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (ICDEW). pp. 85–90. arXiv:1904.10138. doi:10.1109/icdew.2019.00-30. ISBN 978-1-7281-0890-2.