Three Indian scientists, including the Director General of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Dr Raghunath Mashelkar, would be honoured by the Third World Academy of Sciences at the 10th General Conference in Brazil [Images] in 2006.

Professor of Mathematics at TIFR, Dr R Parimala has been awarded the 2005 TWAS award for her outstanding work in mathematics.

The prize, which carries a cash award of $ 10,000 and a plaque inscribed with the recipient's major  contributions, will be presented on the occasion of the Academy's 10th General Conference in Brazil in 2006, a TIFR release said on Thursday.

Parimala is the first woman scientist to receive the prize in the field of mathematics and her paper was on
'The quadratic analogue of Serre's conjecture, the triviality of principal homogeneous spaces of classical groups over cd-2 fields and the u-invariant of p-adic function fields', TIFR said.

57-year old Prof Parimala was a student of Stella Maris College, Chennai and she obtained her MSc degree from Madras University in 1970. She joined TIFR in 1975 and has been working there since then.

The TWAS prize for chemistry was won by Dr Krishna N Ganesh of National Chemical Laboratory, Pune for his
contribution to molecular recognition-based design synthesis and bio-organic studies of novel chemically-modified DNA and NA with potential applications in therapeutics and diagnostics, according to TWSA sources.