IIT-JEE Topper Nitin Gupta Returns to India to Study Mosquito Brains
Nitin Gupta, IIT-JEE AIR 1 in 2000, left a US research career to join IIT Kanpur in 2014 and now studies mosquito brains.
Most students who clear the Indian Institutes of Technology entrance examination chase high-paying corporate roles or settle abroad. Nitin Gupta, who secured All India Rank 1 in 2000, took a different route — one that eventually led him back to India and into the study of mosquito brains.
Gupta earned his IIT degree in computer science in 2000 and moved to the University of California, San Diego, where his PhD centred on bioinformatics and systems biology. He later worked in a cognitive neuroscience laboratory before joining the National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral researcher.
Despite a settled overseas research career and the pull of multinational employment, Gupta returned to India in 2014 and joined IIT Kanpur as a professor. The Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Swades was among the influences behind that decision, and Gupta has acknowledged the film's role in drawing him home.
At IIT Kanpur, his laboratory examines how nervous systems convert environmental information into behaviour. The institute describes him as a "computer engineer-turned-neuroscientist."
His research uses insects — particularly mosquitoes, flies and grasshoppers — as models. Mosquitoes are especially useful because their behaviour is strongly shaped by smell. The lab studies how neural circuits process odours and how the brain decides which signals should attract an animal and which should trigger avoidance. One line of work compares how a mosquito's brain responds to the smell of a human host against a repellent.
The broader question at the heart of his work is how a nervous system takes in information from the world and turns it into action, including responses to experiences the animal has not previously learnt from.
Gupta's scientific contributions have drawn several honours: the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award in 2015, the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Fellowship in 2016, the Swarnajayanti Fellowship in Life Sciences in 2021, the CNR Rao Faculty Award in 2022 and the S Ramchandran National Bioscience Award in 2023. In 2025, he was named to the Joy Gill Chair and received an Excellence-in-Teaching Award from IIT Kanpur.
His trajectory — from a top-ranked computer science entrant to a neuroscientist studying insect brains — departs sharply from the conventional IIT path.