Prem Watsa donates $5 million to IIT-M’s brain research centre

Indian Institute of technology, Madras, has received a $5 million (about Rs 41 crore) research grant from its alumnus and Fairfax Financial Holdings founder Prem Watsa, to support research activities of the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre at the institute.

The Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre at IIT-Madras was launched in March 2022. It has developed a high-throughput histology pipeline that processes whole human brains into high-resolution digital images at a petabyte scale. These images of different types and ages of human brains reveal cellular-level details of the brain and are being studied by neuroscience experts for new knowledge and discovery.

The donation was facilitated by the Canadian Friends of IIT-Madras, a Canadian Revenue Agency-registered charity that seeks to advance the cause of IIT-Madras among its Canadian alumni and Canadian society at large, IIT-M said in a news release on Tuesday.

Fairfax Financial chief executive Watsa said, “The technology platform they have developed that generates high-resolution image volumes of human brains is very unique. It has far-reaching impact in advancing our knowledge of human brains, developing insights that will lead to solutions for highly challenging brain diseases.”

The research centre has been established with support from IIT-M alumnus and Infosys cofounder S Gopalakrishnan and his spouse Sudha Gopalakrishnan.

“This augments the support the centre is already receiving from various philanthropic and CSR funds and enables the centre to scale up its research on human brain atlas,” Kris Gopalakrishnan said.