B. Pharmacy, University of Bombay; DCM, DVPT, Datapro
Research Interests:
Application of consciousness studies to society, academics, socio-economics and corporates.
Personal statement:
I am a pharmacist by education.
I have been into IT and management for the past eight years. Having acutely felt the lack of higher education, I wanted to pursue my masters in a field that in some manner took cognizance of my knowledge in the pharmacy field and experience in the IT and Management sector.
My bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy taught me, among other things, the influence of drugs on the human body and the physiology and anatomy of the human body.
My brush with IT and more precisely programming languages exposed me to the world of logic and computers. This fueled my interest in the ‘Artificial Intelligence’ field, with a desire to know more about what intelligence, in humans and in machines in particular, is all about.
To pursue a post graduate degree in management or pharmacy (if I wanted to join the pharma bandwagon) would have been the logical progression for me. I realized that a post graduate degree in any pharmacy-related field (pharmacology, pharmaceutics or clinical pharmacy) would be too didactic and unstimulating, and likewise for an MBA. I wanted to use my scientific and logical mind to approach certain issues that have always aroused my curiosity, like the meaning of life, intelligence, nature-nurture, consciousness, cognition and psychology. These issues have remained in the spiritual and psychological realm, but I wanted a truly scientific and logical study into these disciplines.
I was looking up cognitive sciences over the net when the page of BVI cropped up in one of my searches. The more I read about it, the more I was convinced about the relevance of the course to my needs.
One semester into the course, I realize that science is approaching the frontiers of the human mind and consciousness. Or rather, the subject of consciousness is knocking the doors of our understanding. In every scientific field, be it molecular biology, genetics, quantum physics, neuroscience or chemistry, we seem to have hit the final roadblock towards the ultimate comprehension. There seems to be an anticipation that one theory would suffice to account for all the puzzles that have dodged the above-mentioned sciences. The interdisciplinary nature of this course affords a study into the nature of consciousness and cognition from varied standpoints like those of AI, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and logic.
I hope to come out from this course with a deeper and broader understanding of life in general and cognition in particular and subsequently utilize this understanding to contribute significantly to whichever field I pursue later, be it research, academia or the corporate sphere.
