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During his undergraduate years, Nitin Gupta developed an interest in biology. Now, he is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur.
News18
Meet Nitin Gupta, who secured All India Rank 1 in the IIT-JEE in 2000 and joined IIT Kanpur to study Computer Science. He completed his B.Tech in 2004 before moving to the US for higher studies. Today, he is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur, where he researches neuroscience and how neural circuits process information.
From Computer Science To Neuroscience
During his undergraduate years at IIT Kanpur, Gupta developed an interest in biology. After graduating in Computer Science, he pursued a PhD in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at the University of California, San Diego, completing it in 2009.
Following his PhD, Gupta spent time in a cognitive neuroscience laboratory at UC San Diego before joining the US National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral researcher. There, he trained in electrophysiology, a technique used to study the electrical activity of neurons.
His academic journey gradually shifted from computer science and computational biology towards experimental neuroscience.
In 2014, Gupta returned to India and joined IIT Kanpur as a faculty member, where he established his research laboratory. The institute describes him as a “computer engineer-turned-neuroscientist”.
Why Does Nitin Gupta Study Mosquito Brains?
Gupta’s laboratory studies how neural circuits process sensory information and produce behaviour. One of its main areas of research is the insect olfactory system — essentially, how insects process smells.
The lab uses mosquitoes, flies and grasshoppers as model organisms and combines techniques such as electrophysiology, histology, behavioural experiments, genetic manipulation and computational modelling. One area of focus is understanding how mosquitoes respond to smells, including attractive human odours and repellent chemicals.
A key part of this research is the antennal lobe, a region of the mosquito brain involved in processing odour information.
What Did His Mosquito Research Find?
In a 2023 study published in Nature Communications, Gupta and his collaborators examined how odours are represented by neurons in the antennal lobe of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
The researchers developed an experimental method to record the electrical activity of individual neurons in the mosquito’s antennal lobe. They found that a single odour could activate multiple neurons and that both the identity of an odour and the behavioural preference associated with it could be represented through patterns of activity across groups of neurons.
In simpler terms, the findings suggest that the mosquito brain does not necessarily rely on one dedicated neuron for each smell. Instead, different smells can be represented through combinations of activity across several neurons.
The research is part of a larger effort to understand how nervous systems receive information from the environment, process it and ultimately produce behaviour.
Gupta has also earned several honours, including the S. Ramchandran National Bioscience Award, the C.N.R. Rao Faculty Award and the Swarnajayanti Fellowship in Life Sciences.
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September 29, 2026, 11:08 IST
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