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Gopinath Balakrish Nair (born 5 January 1954) is an Indianmicrobiologist known for his work oncholera.[1] At present,[when?] he is the Ag. Regional Adviser, Research Policy and Cooperation Unit, Department of Communicable Diseases, World Health Organization. Before joining WHO, he was the executive director of Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI),Faridabad,NCR, India. Before joining THSTI, he was working in NICED as the director. He has also served as the director of Laboratory Sciences Division at the International Center for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, (ICDDR, B),Dhaka, Bangladesh.
He received BSc degree fromMadras University in 1975 & MSc degree inMarine Biology in 1977 fromAnnamalai University, and acquired PhD fromAnnamalai University in 1982. He joined the Department ofMicrobiology,National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED), Calcutta, a constituent Institute of the Indian Council of Medical Research and aWHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Diarrhoeal Diseases, in 1981 and worked there till 5 April 2000, after which he took up his current assignment. He has been working on entericpathogens with particular emphasis onVibrio cholerae, the causative agent of the disease cholera.
In 1987–88, he did postdoctoral research on the heat-stableenterotoxin of V. cholerae with Dr.Tae Takeda in the Department of Infectious Diseases Research, National Children's Medical Research Center, Tokyo, Japan and in 1994–95 he did his sabbatical research on molecularepidemiology of V. cholerae at the Department of Microbiology,Kyoto University, with ProfessorYoshifumi Takeda. He was a visiting scientist at the Department of International Health,Johns Hopkins University,Baltimore, Maryland, in 1992 for three months, where he worked with Dr.David Sack and at the Laboratory Centre for Disease Control,Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 1985 where he worked with Dr.Hermy Lior.
Dr. Nair is an elected member of the Subcommittee on theTaxonomy of Vibrionaceae, International Committee on SystematicBacteriology from 1986. In August 1996 at the Jerusalem IUMS Congress, he was elected as the Secretary of this subcommittee. He was elected to the position of Member-at-Large of theInternational Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS) at the Executive Board Meeting held on 7 July 1994 atPrague, Czech Republic and held this position until August 1999; he is the first Indian Microbiologist to be on the executive board of the IUMS. He was elected as the Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India (FNASc) in 1995, as Member of Guha Research Council (GRC) in 1997 and as Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Sciences (FNA) in 2002. On 30 April 2002, Dr. Nair was elected as a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, USA and on 26 November 2004, he was elected as a Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences,Trieste, Italy, now renamed as theAcademy of Sciences for the Developing Nations, in November 2004.
Dr. Nair was awarded the Certificate of Merit by theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),Atlanta, Georgia, in recognition and appreciation for his outstanding contribution to Public Health Education for Vibrio cholerae andCholera in March 1994. On 5 January 1998 he was awarded the Professor S.C. Mahalanobis Memorial Award from thePhysiological Society of India and delivered the Memorial Oration at theIndian Science Congress atHyderabad. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Medical Sciences in 1998 for his contributions which led to the discovery of the new cholera causingserogroup now globally known as Vibrio cholerae O139 Bengal and for his contributions on describing a cell-rounding factor from strains of Vibrio cholerae.[1]
Dr. Nair is on the editorial board of several journals, includingJournal of Clinical Microbiology (Publication of the American Society of Microbiology), Epidemiology and Infection (Cambridge University Press),Microbes and Environment,Indian Journal of Medical Research,Indian Journal of Experimental Biology and theIndian Journal of Microbiology. Under the supervision of Dr. Nair, 25 students have obtained their doctoral degrees. He is the author of over 400 research papers in the area of Clinical Microbiology, Molecular Epidemiology and Molecular Pathogenesis of Enteric bacteria.
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