Diaspora Of ScienTists from India (DOSTI)

The Diaspora Of ScienTists from India (DOSTI) hosted its first official get together of its members on Saturday evening, February 1, Andover, MA. Nearly a hundred of top level-scientists gathered with great enthusiasm and made their meet a grand success.

The creation of DOSTI was thought about by few scientist friends about A couple years ago and their thought took its official shape this year and launched it with its formal vision and mission statements. The vision of DOSTI is to promote fellowship among scientists and technologists; provide mentorship for their careers in academic institutions, pharmaceutical and Bio-tech industries. And also nurture young generations in STEM fields and augment them with the latest trends in bio-pharmaceutical industry. The main 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 to an exciting event. Dr Prasanna also 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 of DOSTI with a brief description of their roles to the audiences. Dr. Jagdish Tewari, the President narrated his story of how the idea of building DOSTI group, came to his mind at first and discussed with Dr. Nishanth Gopinathan, 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, and the Founding Members, organized a Breakout session moderated by 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. They were asked to come up with their actionable items and their feasibility to meet our goals and suggest any specific metrics to the track their success in reaching those set goals. This exercise engaged all the members and motivated them to actively participate in their respective interest group and suggest different actionable items to their team leads based on their own experiences or their experiences with their children/youth. After a half hour of brainstorming, all the group members gathered again in the hall and presented their feedback from the Breakout session in the form of list of actionable items to the entire group. Dr Promod Pandey, Dr Jagdish Tewari, and Dr Nishanth Gopinathan presented some short & long-term plans and answered all the questions of the audiences very diligently.

Also, Dr Sriram Rajgopalan presented his eye-catching video clipping about DOSTI, its role and significance. Finally, the President 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 selfless services provided behind and during this event and making it an outstanding and memorable one.