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IIT Kanpur Professor Nitin Gupta: From JEE Topper to Mosquito Brain Researcher
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News18•29-09-2026, 11:14
IIT Kanpur Professor Nitin Gupta: From JEE Topper to Mosquito Brain Researcher
- •Nitin Gupta, an IIT-JEE 2000 topper, initially pursued Computer Science at IIT Kanpur before shifting his focus to neuroscience.
- •He earned a PhD in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and trained in electrophysiology, gradually moving from computational biology to experimental neuroscience.
- •Gupta returned to IIT Kanpur in 2014 as a faculty member, establishing a lab to study how neural circuits process sensory information.
- •His research primarily focuses on the insect olfactory system, using mosquitoes, flies, and grasshoppers to understand how they process smells.
- •A key study by Gupta and his team in Nature Communications revealed that mosquito brains represent odors through combinations of activity across multiple neurons, not single dedicated neurons.
Key Questions Answered
Prof Nitin Gupta is a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur who secured All India Rank 1 in the IIT-JEE in the year 2000 and completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from the institute.
His laboratory studies how insect neural circuits process sensory information, specifically focusing on the olfactory system of model organisms like mosquitoes, flies, and grasshoppers to understand how they respond to various odours.
A 2023 study published in Nature Communications by Gupta and his collaborators suggests that the mosquito brain does not rely on one dedicated neuron per smell, but instead represents different smells through combinations of activity across several neurons.
