ENS-IISER partnership - IISER Tirupati students’ internship experience

The ENS-IISER partnership encouraged Megha Jacob and Deevitha Balasubramanian, graduate students in biology at IISER Tirupati, to apply for a 6-month internship at ENS de Lyon in 2021. In the frame of the international strategies and common actions of the Écoles normales supérieures in France, ENS de Lyon has taken the lead in the creation of a partnership with the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) in India. In 2018 the ENS-IISER network implemented a framework agreement allowing their institutions to collaborate on different levels: development of exchange programs, joint training, seminars, joint research and publications, as well as research internships. This collaboration encouraged Megha Jacob and Deevitha Balasubramanian, graduate students in biology at IISER Tirupati, to apply for an internship at ENS de Lyon in 2020. Muriel Grammont , Megha's tutor, was one of the first French teacher-researcher to go and teach at one of the IISERs in the early days of the ENS-IISER collaboration. She works at the LBMC (Laboratory of Biology and Modelling of the Cell) and manages a team currently working on Epithelial differentiation and morphogenesis in Drosophila. Deevitha's tutor was Yad Ghavi-Helm , a research group leader in molecular biology working on a project called Regulatory genomics during Drosophila embryogenesis: functional dissection of enhancer-promoter interactions, at IGFL (Institute of Functional Genomics of Lyon).