At the 15th annual convocation of the National Institute of Mental Health And Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore on January 20, 2011, Dr Urvakhsh Mehta, who completed 29 years on March 2, received a special award for best student of MD Psychiatry along with his degree, at the hands of chancellor Gulam Nabi Azad, union minister of Health and Family Welfare. His father Meherwan sent this information to Parsiana. After the convocation, Mehta told The Times of India: "I wanted to look into the neuro science behind human behavior. I wanted to know why a certain behavioral problem happens. I am presently a senior resident at NIMHANS. Later I want to do clinical care and research and study schizophrenia.”
(left): receiving award and degree at convocation; Dr Urvakhsh Mehta;
Mehta, who schooled at Mount Carmel High School in the small town of Shahabad in North Karnataka, was always interested in the biological sciences, mentions his father. He joined the Government Medical College in Mysore for his MBBS studies. Ever a first class student, Mehta received educational assistance from the Bombay Parsi Punchayet Funds and Properties for his medical studies. He then moved to Bangalore and joined NIMHANS, the nation’s leading facility for the study and treatment of mental and neuro disorders, to pursue a three-year masters degree in psychiatry.
His work at NIMHANS has earned the young psychiatrist laurels in India and abroad, Mehta’s father writes. For his MD thesis titled "Social cognition in patients with schizophrenia in remission and its association with their functioning” he was given a financial award by the Indian Council of Medical Research in New Delhi. In 2009 he visited the US to present his findings at a conference in San Diego, and his paper was published in the Schizophrenia Bulletin. He will soon leave for Seoul in South Korea to present a paper on "Social cognition correlates of empathy in schizophrenia.” The Department of Bio Technology of the Ministry of Science and Technology of the government of India has sanctioned him a research grant as "principal investigator” on the subject of "Mirror neurons in schizophrenia.”
Mehta, who is musically inclined, plays the guitar and has performed with his college band at campus fests, the write-up mentions.