The man who heads the Department of Microbiology at Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College in Amravati has three Master’s degrees that have nothing to do with medicine: Sociology, Political Science, and Public Administration. He acquired them while teaching Microbiology full-time. He does not regard this as unusual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pramod Bhise has, over a long career, been quietly interested in everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pramod was born in Murtijapur \u2014 a town in Akola district \u2014 to a school teacher. He did his primary schooling at a Municipal Corporation School in Jatharpeth, Akola, and his high school at Shivaji High School, Akola, before entering Shivaji Science College, Akola, for his pre-medical year. At Shivaji Science, he shared benches with Ganesh Kale and Arun Mankar \u2014 friendships that carried into GMC Nagpur and, in Kale’s case, into a shared flat in Hanuman Nagar during their first years at college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1973, four of them \u2014 Bhise, Mankar, Vijay Thakre, and Rajendra Kokate \u2014 shared accommodation at 529 Hanuman Nagar, Nagpur, before moving into the GMC hostels. Small-town boys negotiating a city, the way so many of the 1973 batch negotiated Nagpur: carefully, together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, Bhise served as a medical officer at the District Hospital in Akola from 1980 to 1986 \u2014 six years of general medical work in a government hospital before he committed to the laboratory sciences. In 1986, he returned to GMC Nagpur and enrolled in the MD (Microbiology) programme. His thesis on Neisseria gonorrhoeae \u2014 a bacterium of both clinical and epidemiological significance \u2014 was supervised by Dr. Pathak and Dr. Kher. He completed his MD in 1986 and served as a lecturer in Microbiology during his postgraduate period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1992, he joined Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College, Amravati \u2014 first as Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, and from 1998 as Professor. He has headed the department since July 2000 and has published 27 research papers in the course of a career that has remained anchored to a single institution for more than three decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The three humanities degrees \u2014 Sociology, Political Science, Public Administration \u2014 accumulated in the gaps. A Microbiology professor who also studies how societies organise themselves, how power works, how public institutions are built and degraded: the combination is not, on reflection, strange. Microbiology is the study of organisms too small to see that shape the fate of populations. Public administration is the study of systems too large to understand that shape the fate of citizens. Bhise is interested in both ends of the scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a batch that produced many doctor-parents who watched their children enter medicine, Pramod Bhise occupies a particular place. Both his daughters are doctors. Both are achievers of a kind that reflects not just inherited aptitude but sustained application.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mayuri, the elder, topped the MD (Microbiology) examination at the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, Nashik. She served as Assistant Professor at VMGMC Solapur and Senior Resident at AIIMS Raipur before joining AIIMS Rajkot as an Assistant Professor \u2014 the same subspecialty as her father, carried a generation forward. She has two dozen published papers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kasturi, the younger, placed in the top ten in the Amravati Board SSC examinations, secured distinctions in eight subjects across her MBBS at PDMMC Amravati, and completed her MD in Medicine at the same institution in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their father does not appear to have pushed them. He appears to have shown them, by example, what sustained intellectual curiosity looks like across a career of five decades. The message, evidently, was received.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"