Gopi Mavankal

Inspired by Bertrand Russell's call to do science where the bricklayer is just as much needed as the architect, I began a career in academia at one of the oldest educational institution in India, Wilson College in Mumbai. The transformative experience in my thinking came from the two PhD advisors I hbricklayerad, a Berkeley Physical Chemist and a Univ of Miami Botanist. My journey in basic research progressed along the lines of using Spin Resonance to understand the water oxidizing enzyme, a multi protein complex to working on a tobacco virus to understand how proteins are modified as they come off the assembly line to investigating how protein expression is being regulated by trying to understand how Human Immunodefieciency virus (HIV) protein transactivator (Tat) produces this huge blasting signal in in-vitro (in the test tube) gene transcriptional system. When it came time to consider what else I could do, my PhD advisor's counsel to work on problems that society needs than that which is dictated from your own background, helped me make the decision to pursue a Masters degree in Computer Science. UTD, a campus donated by Texas Instruments, conducted graduate school classes only in the evenings, a stipulation that TI had set to offer a path to its engineers. Accenture hired me out of school and convinced me that the enterprise platform offered by SAP was a useful area for me to build deeper knowledge in. I have not had a dull day since.