Obaid Siddiqi

Padma Vibhushan(2006)

Obaid Siddiqi FRS (7 January 1932 – 26 July 2013) was a National Research Professor and the Founder-Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) National Center for Biological Sciences. His work includes research on the genetics and neurobiology of Drosophila.

He was born in 1932 in Uttar Pradesh. He received his early education at Aligarh Muslim University where he completed an M.Sc. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow, under the supervision of Guido Pontecorvo. He carried out his post doctoral research at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, and the MRC Laboratory at Cambridge. He was invited by Homi Bhabha to set up the molecular biology unit at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay in 1962. Thirty years later, he became the founding director of the TIFR National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, where he would continue his research into his final days of life.

Siddiqi died on 26 July 2013 in Bangalore following a freak road accident on 21 July 2013 which caused severe damage to the brain. He is survived by his wife Asiya, sons Imran and Kaleem, and daughters Yumna and Diba.