In 2000, he was All India Rank 1 in IIT-JEE. He took Computer Science at IIT Kanpur and finished the degree. Then he left computing altogether and today he studies the brains of mosquitoes. His name is Nitin Gupta. He graduated in 2004 with a BTech in computer science and an interest in biology that had been quietly growing through his undergraduate years. He went to the University of California, San Diego for a PhD in bioinformatics and systems biology, finishing in 2009. Then he spent a few months in a cognitive neuroscience lab there, using magnetic stimulation to study how urges for food and money leak into the motor system before a person actually moves. From 2010 to 2014 he was at the National Institutes of Health, in a laboratory studying sensory coding, learning electrophysiology. Recording the electrical conversation between neurons, one spike at a time. In July 2014, he came back to IIT Kanpur as faculty in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering. His lab asks a question that sounds simple and is not. How does a brain decide that something is worth moving towards, or running away from, without ever having learned it? They use smell, and they use insects. Grasshoppers, flies and mosquitoes. A mosquito finds you largely by carbon dioxide, picked up by sensory neurons on its maxillary palps and carried into a region of its brain called the antennal lobe. Gupta's lab works on how those circuits weigh a human body against a repellent, and how that computation becomes a decision to approach or turn away. His group also built TreadWill, a free, fully automated cognitive behavioural therapy programme for depression, designed for people in countries where therapists are scarce. In a randomised trial with 598 participants in India, users who completed at least half the modules showed significant reductions in depression and anxiety symptoms. Of the twenty students who topped IIT-JEE between 2000 and 2019, twelve now work outside India. He is not one of them. "I always knew I had to return. Movies like Swades inspired me."