Beena Pillai

Beena Ramakrishnan Pillai is an Indian microbiologist, geneticist, and a scientist at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology.

She is known for her studies on gene regulation influenced by small RNA and histone variants and is a recipient of the Young Scientist Award of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Young Scientist Medal of the INSA.

Pillai, born in the south Indian state of Kerala, obtained her BSc in microbiology from Ramnarain Ruia College of the University of Mumbai in 1995 and joined the Indian Institute of Science for the integrated program which earned her an MS in life sciences in 1998 and a PhD in 2002.

[5] Pillai's research focuses the fields of non-coding RNA in neuronal function and dysfunction, regulation of neural gene expression mediated by histone variants and nerve regeneration factor from Earthworm.

[8] Pillai received the Young Scientist Award of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in 2008[9] for her work in transcriptomics[10] and a year later, she was selected by the Indian National Science Academy for the 2009 Young Scientist Medal.