Indian American professor among three killed in university shooting - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

An Indian-American professor was among three persons killed during a Friday afternoon shooting incident on the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In all, six persons were targetted, and out of them, three died. Indian-American professor Gopi K Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, were killed on Friday. Three others were also injured in the incident. Of the other three injured, one was said to be in serious condition, Fox News reports. A biology professor, Amy Bishop, has been taken into custody in connection with the incident, The Huntsville Times reported. Bishop, a Harvard University-trained neuroscientist and her husband have also been detained, the newspaper reported. Neither has been charged. Police said the shooter fired at about 4 p.m. during a biology faculty meeting on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. The three injured people are being treated at Huntsville Hospital. A hospital spokesperson confirmed that two men and one woman had been taken there for treatment, with two of those patients in a critical condition. CBS News affiliate WHNT-TV reported the suspect had been denied tenure at the university and the victims were all faculty members. Police searched the floors of the Shelby Center before declaring the building secure. The center, named for Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, opened in 2007 and contains teaching and research labs, classrooms, auditoriums and offices. A 911 call indicated as many as 10 people may have been shot at the center by a woman in her 30s wearing a pink sweater, The Huntsville Times said. The Huntsville campus, approximately 85 miles north of Birmingham, has about 7,500 students in northern Alabama, not far from the Tennessee line. The university announced late Friday that all classes had been canceled and a command center had been set up with counselors available to speak to students. Senator Shelby said he was saddened to hear of the shooting. Podila's research interest included functional genomics of plant-microbe interactions (mycorrhizal and pathogenic interactions, global gene expression profiling, gene modeling and bioinformatics) and plant molecular biology and biotechnology (functional genomics of developmental control of reproductive tissues and vascular tissues (wood formation) using aspen as a model system),the rediff.com web site reports.