Members from Prof. Chaitanya Athale’s research group from IISER Pune’s Department of Biology put up a stall at the Indian Science Fest 2025 held from 11-12 Jan 2025 at Fergusson College in Pune. Here, PhD student Tanvi Kale and group leader Chaitanya A. Athale share their excitement about participating in this public engagement event. They also share here a few resources they prepared for the event to spark interest and describe their research in an accessible manner. Read on to learn more!
The India Science Fest 2025 was held from 11-12 Jan 2025 on the campus of Fergusson College in Pune. Along with events, entertainment, demos and debates, India Science Fest 2025 also had 22 booths, including one from our research group from IISER Pune. The IISER Pune booth was put together by the research lab members of Prof. Athale’s team “Cytoskeleton and Cell Shape Lab” (CyCelS Lab) with PhD student Tanvi Kale (2020) taking the lead, and other PhD students in the lab Saba Noor (2024), Kajal Singh (2024), Prachi Negi (2024) helping out. Along with them, several enthusiastic undergraduate students Aniket Kumar, Nitin Dhamija, Kavya Thaliaparmbil, Sumit Singh and Neelanshi Jain also contributed to the explanations.
The stalls were up from approximately 9 a.m., and visitors continued to stream in until 4:30 p.m. with some having to be turned away because we ran out of time! The excitement was palpable, with up to 25,000 visitors making their way to the ISF2025. We titled our stall as “Balloon physics, bacteria and antibiotics” to communicate the intimate connection between the physics of balloons and bacteria and connect it with the role of some antibiotics of the β-lactam class that weaken the wall.
To make the explanation interactive, we made a 15-min video that can be seen on YouTube here. In addition, we had set up a wide-field optics compound microscope with a Celestron camera connected to a computer that was live-streaming images of bacteria magnified 450x as they wandered around between two glass coverslips. Finally, we (Tanvi Kale and Prof. Chaitanya Athale) had put together a zine that attempted to explain in simple language the connection between the physics of balloons, soap bubbles and bacterial cell integrity. This zine was illustrated by a talented artist, Madhumita Laddha, and can be downloaded from here [pdf][png].
With questions ranging from “why cell size and shape matters” to “the time it will take to develop new antibiotics”, we were flooded with eager questions from people as young as 10, through medical practitioners and B.Sc. and M.Sc. students from all streams. All in all, it was an exhausting but satisfying exercise. We hope in some way to have conveyed the excitement of the problems of bacterial cell shape and rigidity that out lab works on, its relevance to the development of new medicines and the parts of it that everyone can relate to.
- by Tanvi Kale and Chaitanya A. Athale, Department of Biology, IISER Pune
