B. Madhusoodana Kurup

B. Madhusoodana Kurup was born on 28 November 1954. His place of birth and details of his parents and childhood were not made public in the sources available at his death. His name also appears as B. Madhusoodhana Kurup and, in Malayalam, as Madhusoodanakkurup.

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Kerala, then completed an MSc and a PhD at Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), with his doctoral thesis dated 1983. He did postdoctoral research at the Fish Culture and Fisheries group of Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands, and held a Marie Curie fellowship of the European Union.

He taught and researched at Kerala Agricultural University and then at CUSAT, where he served for more than eighteen years as UGC Professor of Fisheries and became Director of the School of Industrial Fisheries. By 2011 he had more than 32 years of research and 30 years of teaching behind him and had led five international and 14 national research projects funded by the European Commission, the Indo-Dutch cooperation programme, Nuffic, ICAR, the Department of Ocean Development, the World Bank, the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Earth Sciences and the Government of Kerala. He worked as a fishery expert on the Indo-Dutch Kuttanad Water Balance Study, as inland fishery expert for the Ashtamudi Management Plan with New Zealand, as a fishery consultant on the World Bank India Eco-development Project, and as an aquaculture expert on an NZAID cage culture project. He guided 25 PhD and 12 MPhil students and published more than 250 papers, including later work on deep-sea fishes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the southeastern Arabian Sea.

From 2006 to 2011 he was scientific adviser to Kerala Fisheries Minister S. Sarma, in the rank of a government secretary, and he served two terms on the Kerala Coastal Zone Management Authority. The Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies Act was passed at the end of 2010, and the university was inaugurated at Panangad, Kochi, on 20 February 2011. Kurup took charge as its first Vice-Chancellor on 9 March 2011, and KUFOS began functioning on 1 April 2011, built around the former College of Fisheries of Kerala Agricultural University and the Fisheries Research Station at Puthuvype. As the first university in India devoted only to fisheries and ocean studies, it fell to him to set up its structure and programmes. He was still leading it in 2016, when he opened a national workshop on breeding native freshwater fishes.

He went on to serve as the third Vice-Chancellor of Shri Venkateshwara University in Gajraula, Uttar Pradesh. He chaired the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Aquaculture under the Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA), chaired the Research Advisory Committee of the ICAR Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture in Chennai, served as a subject expert for the Agricultural Scientists Recruitment Board in selecting senior ICAR scientists and directors, and taught as adjunct faculty at CUSAT's School of Industrial Fisheries.

With his student K. V. Radhakrishnan he described Tor remadevii, the orange-finned mahseer of the Pambar River in the Western Ghats, in a paper published in 2007 from a 2006 symposium in Kuala Lumpur. The fish, now listed as critically endangered, had long been in taxonomic doubt, and the name later supported conservation work on the hump-backed mahseer. In 2012 K. Krishnakumar, F. G. Benno Pereira and K. V. Radhakrishnan named a barb from the Manimala River Puntius madhusoodani in his honour, for his work on the taxonomy and conservation of Kerala's freshwater fishes.

He was married to Dr Jayasree Madhu. Their son, Rakesh M Kurup, works at Infopark, Kochi, and their daughter, Dr Reshma Rajeev, is a medical officer with the Kerala Health Services Department. His daughter-in-law is Jayalakshmi S and his son-in-law is the neurosurgeon Dr R Rajeev. The family home, Jayam, is at Paruthichuvadu, Nettoor, in Kochi.

As Vice-Chancellor he argued that people were increasingly dependent on the ocean and that sustainable use of its resources was essential to conserve them. He linked declining fish catches along India's coast to global warming and ocean warming and urged policymakers to adopt long-term programmes. He warned that about 30 percent of freshwater fish species in the Western Ghats were endangered, said habitat protection should come first in conservation, and pushed for captive breeding technology that would reach farmers.

He is remembered above all as the scientist who built KUFOS from its first days into a working university, and as a teacher whose dozens of research students went on to careers in fisheries science. A critically endangered mahseer carries the name he helped give it, and a Kerala barb carries his own name.

Dr. S. Jones Centenary Award, Marine Biological Association of India (2010). Pandit Karuppan Award (2016). A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Gold Medal Award, Global Economic Prospects and Research Association. Marie Curie Fellowship, European Union. Nuffic fellowships, including the South-South programme of the Netherlands. Aquagris, EU 6th Framework Programme (2007). Bharat Jyothi Award, India International Friendship Society, New Delhi. Eponym: Puntius madhusoodani (2012).

He died in the early hours of Sunday, 18 October 2026, at a private hospital in Kochi, aged 71. Mathrubhumi reported that his death followed a heart attack. The funeral was held at 4 pm the same day at his residence in Nettoor. Kerala Fisheries Minister V. E. Abdul Gafoor condoled his death, and his passing was reported by Mathrubhumi, The Hindu, Onmanorama, Janam TV and News Malayalam 24x7.