Join Us for an Intellectual Experience!

Date: 27th Sep 2026
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: Watsons ( 3rd floor) , Indiranagar, Bengaluru

About the lecture

Everything in the universe consists of matter or its equivalent, energy. Living organisms, we humans included, are no exception. However, just like the other four states of matter, the living state has properties peculiar to itself. Most strikingly, it is an enormously diverse state with unifying features.

What makes living matter different from everything else in the universe? How does matter acquire the remarkable ability to organise itself, sustain itself, reproduce and evolve? And how can such extraordinary diversity—from a single-celled organism to the human body—share fundamental features?

This lecture will present an overview of the essential features of living matter and how they have arisen, along with a mention of where the effort to understand them has brought us today. It will explore the fundamental principles that distinguish living systems and the questions that continue to shape our understanding of life itself.

About the speaker

Prof. Vidyanand Nanjundiah is an evolutionary and theoretical biologist whose work spans developmental biology, evolution and the study of social behaviour. Based at the Centre for Human Genetics, Bengaluru, he has explored how simple organisms organise themselves, cooperate and evolve into increasingly complex forms of life. His research has contributed to our understanding of multicellularity, self-organisation and the evolution of social behaviour. He continues to explore questions around how agency can emerge from individuals and become a property of groups.