Who is Nitin Gupta, JEE 2000 AIR 1 who left computer science to study mosquito brains

Nitin Gupta topped the IIT-JEE in 2000, studied computer science at IIT Kanpur and then moved to the US for higher studies. More than two decades later, he is back at the same institute, but his work has little to do with computers, India Today reported on Sunday.

Nitin is now studying how insect brains process smells and turn that information into behaviour, including how mosquitoes respond to human odours.

He returned to India in 2014 after completing his PhD and working as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health and later joined IIT Kanpur's Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering as a faculty member.

His decision to return was partly inspired by Swades. Gupta has said the Shah Rukh Khan film played a role in making him think about returning to India.

But coming back was not just about changing countries. Gupta also changed his field.

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From computer science to neuroscience

Gupta joined IIT Kanpur in 2000 after securing AIR 1 in the IIT-JEE. He completed his B.Tech. in Computer Science in 2004.

During his time at IIT Kanpur, he developed an interest in biology. He went on to the University of California, San Diego, where he completed a PhD in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology in 2009.

His early research brought together computers and biology, with work on proteins and genomes.

He then moved towards neuroscience. After his PhD, Gupta spent several months in a cognitive neuroscience laboratory at UC San Diego, studying how an impulse for food or money is translated into movement before a person acts.

From 2010 to 2014, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health, where he studied electrophysiology, or the electrical activity of neurons.

By the time he returned to India in July 2014, his academic interests had moved a long way from computer science.

Why is he studying mosquitoes?

At IIT Kanpur, Gupta's laboratory studies how the brain processes smells and uses that information to guide behaviour.

The lab works with grasshoppers, flies and mosquitoes. Researchers use techniques including electrophysiology, histology, behavioural experiments, genetic manipulation and computational modelling.

One of the questions they are trying to answer is simple: how does a brain decide what to approach and what to avoid?

Mosquitoes offer a useful way to study this. They detect chemical signals in the environment and use them to find hosts. Human bodies release a mixture of chemical signals, some of which can help mosquitoes locate a person, while others can make them move away.

Gupta's laboratory has studied the antennal lobe, a region of the mosquito brain involved in processing smell.

In a 2023 paper published in Nature Communications, Gupta and his collaborators studied how individual odours are represented by neurons in the antennal lobe of Aedes aegypti.

The researchers used intracellular electrophysiology, morphological reconstruction and immunohistochemistry to study the neurons and their connections.

His lab has also looked at why neural connections can vary between individual insects even when their responses to odours remain organised. More recent work has focused on neuromodulation, including how an insect's internal state changes its response to smells.

One area of research has examined how a female mosquito's attraction to human odours changes after it has taken a blood meal.

His work also looks at the human mind

Mosquitoes are not the only focus of Gupta's research.

His group also helped develop TreadWill, an automated cognitive behavioural therapy programme for people who may have limited access to therapists.

A randomised trial involving 598 participants in India found that those who completed at least half of the programme showed reductions in symptoms of depression and anxiety compared with the waitlist group.

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Recognition for his work

Gupta has received several awards and fellowships during his career.

IIT Kanpur records 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.

When ThePrint examined the careers of 20 IIT-JEE toppers between 2000 and 2019, it found that 12 were working outside India. Gupta was among those who returned.

He came back to IIT Kanpur, the institute where he had once studied computer science. Today, his work takes him inside the tiny brains of insects, as he tries to understand how the nervous system turns information into behaviour.