Finance Committee

Mr. Vishvajit Sahay belongs to the 1990 batch of the Indian Defence Accounts Service. An alumnus of St. Stephen’s College Delhi, he has diverse experience of working in the Government of India, having earlier served as Joint Secretary in the Department of Heavy Industry and Director in the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting. He has held additional charge of the posts of Chairman & Managing Director, Heavy Engineering Corporation Ranchi, a Schedule ‘A’ CPSE, CEO & Project Director of National Automotive Testing Research & Development Infrastructure Project (NATRIP) and Director in the Directorate of Film Festivals, Delhi.  Within the Defence Accounts Department, he has experience of working in the Acquisition Wing of the Ministry of Defence as Finance Manager (Land Systems), a cadre post in the MoD. He has also worked in several field and Headquarters Organizations of the Defence Accounts Department with experience of closely working with the MOD, Army and Ordnance Factories.

At present, Shri Sahay is working as Additional Secretary & Financial Adviser for the Department of Science & Technology, with the charge of the Department of Biotechnology and the Ministry of Earth Sciences.

Professor Pulok Kumar Mukherjee is working as the Director, Institute of Bioresources and Sustainable Development (IBSD), Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India having its presence at IBSD Imphal, Manipur; Aizawl, Mizoram; Gangtok, Sikkim and Shilong, Meghalaya. He has been working on Drug discovery from natural resources with its several translation components on chemistry of natural products, Pharmacology, therapeutics, chemical biology, metabolomics and related aspects. He has enormous expertise in Ethnopharmacology, ethno medicine, and evidence based validation of herbs used in several ancient systems leading to discovery of drugs from nature and from the ancestors. Prof. Mukherjee has more than 29 years of experience on several areas on development of Bioeconomy from Bioresources particularly on traditional medicine inspired drug discovery from Indian medicinal plants, Ethno pharmacology and evidence based validation of medicinal herbs to make them available from ‘Farm to Pharma’. His academic and research career has been outstanding, including globally acclaimed contributions on teaching and research on validation of medicinal plants from Indian systems of medicine, their formulation and standardization, which are useful bio-prospecting tools for the traditional medicine based drug discovery programme. Under his guidance, 35 students have completed their PhD degree. Prof. Mukherjee has more than 255 research publications having total Impact Factor ≥ 278; h-Index- 70, i10-index – 377; citation over 25000 times. Prof. Mukherjee has been listed as Top 2% of the scientist/authors of the world based on the independent survey made by a group form Stanford USA. He has authored/edited 8 books and 21 book chapters with Elsevier, Academic Press, Wiley, Pharma Press etc. He has several national/international patents. Prof. Mukherjee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Fellow of National Academy of Sciences, India (FNASc), Fellow of National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (FNAAS), Fellow of the West Bengal Academy of Science & Technology (FAScT). He has been awarded with several laurels from Govt. of India and abroad: awarded with the prestigious Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellowship from Association of Commonwealth Universities [ACU], UK; TATA innovation fellowship, by Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India; Outstanding Service Award from Drug Information association [DIA], USA; Career Award for Young Teacher from All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), BOYSCAST Fellowship from the Dept of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India; Best Pharmaceutical Scientist, from the Association of Pharmaceutical Teachers’ of India (APTI); Col RN Chopra oration award from Indian Pharmacological Society (IPS); IASTAM Award for Contributions to Development of Ayurvedic and Herbal Pharmaceutics by Indian Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM) and many others. Prof. Mukherjee is serving as a Consulting editor, Pharmacological Research, Associate Editor of the Phytomedicine plus, Elsevier Science;. He is the member of the editorial board of several International journals including Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Phytomedicine, Pharmaceutical analysis, Synergy; Phytochemical Analysis, World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Executive Editor of the India J Traditional Knowledge and many others. He is associated as advisor/member to different organizations and administrative bodies of Government of India and abroad. He served as the president of the International Society for Ethnopharmacology, Switzerland and the Founder of the Society for Ethnopharamcology, India, serving with the mission of ‘globalizing local knowledge and localizing global technologies’, Further details are available at www.pulokmukherjee.com Research Interest & Current areas of work: Prof Mukherjee and his research group has been working on Drug discovery from natural resources with its several translation aspects on the production and chemical processing of economically important Medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) particularly on the bio-prospecting of plants and their constituents. His works on metabolomics analysis for development of MAPs are useful for their value addition, reinforcement and sustainable development. His works established the therapeutic validation of the clinical usage of the medicinal plants and traditional medicine to strengthen the chemical and therapeutic claims of MAPs in Indian traditional system of medicine through scientific evaluation and evidence based validation through biological and chemical sciences. He has been working on several translational aspects for MAPs for their assessment through bio-analytical techniques, bioassay guided isolation, enzyme inhibition, pharmacological and microbiological assays. Research contributions of the team along with the translational aspects in the field of MAPs with the products/process developed along with the publications made, is being highlighted as follows:

• Development of Bioeconomy from bioresources
• Pharmacological and therapeutic evaluation of natural products.
• Chemical and therapeutic validation leading to traditional Medicine inspired drug discovery and development to make them available from Farm to Pharma
• Translational Research approach for development of Processes/ products from MAPs:
• Leveraging innovation for development of value added products from therapeutically potent lead components:
• Documentation and evidence based validation of traditional knowledge
• Metabolomics based metabolite profiling, Marker analysis and Standardization of MAPS
• DNA barcoding approach for quality related aspects of MAPS
• Bio-prospecting of natural resources MAPs for development of therapeutically potent lead
• Safety evaluation of herbal medicine
• Development of value added herbal formulations, quality evaluation and validation
• Development of e-nose technologies based on NIR and Raman spectroscopy for quality control of medicinal plants
• Exploring Synergy in MAPs research through omics technology, network pharmacology with their chemical and biological perspectives.
• Sustainable Development of MAPs for strengthening Bioeconomy
• Dissemination of Knowledge for promotion and development of MAPs

Prof. Chandrabhas Narayana is the Director of Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, Thiruvananthapuram. He is also full Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore under the Department of Science and Technology. He has 26 years of experience in Research and Development in autonomous institutions of Government of India and guided several students for their Ph.D. He has been several administrative capacities like Dean, Research and Development, Dean, Fellowship and Extension Programs, Chairman of Chemistry and Physics of Materials, Chairman of The School of Advanced Materials, etc. He is a highly accomplished Raman Spectroscopist. His work with Raman
spectroscopy, along with x-ray synchrotron and molecular dynamic simulations, is truly interdisciplinary, spanning Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. In Biology his group has been contributing significantly to the synthesis of gold and silver nanomaterials and nanostructures
in the area of Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) for applications in Biology. His group is pioneers in the use of Raman spectroscopy as an alternative technique to x-ray crystallography, along with MD simulations to probe the structure/function of proteins, drug-screening and drug design and development applications. The group also uses SERS for DNA/RNA detection, useful in diagnostics of disease, identifying SNPs, etc. The group also is using Raman spectroscopy to identify markers for early detection of diseases, in addition to using Raman spectroscopy for tissue imaging. Prof. Narayana is a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of National Academy of Sciences, India, Fellow of
Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of Kerala Academy of Sciences.

Ashwani Pareek (born 27 September 1969 in Delhi and native of Sambhar Lake, Rajasthan, India) is Executive Director of NABI, a prominent plant biologist and educator noted chiefly for his contribution in the area of plant molecular biology and biotechnology. He is currently working as Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. He is a recipient of several honours including the Visitors award for Technology Development from the President of India for developing Stress Tolerant Rice of the Next Generation (STRONG) that has the potential to enhance the income of rice farmers. He has interest in understanding the physiological and molecular adaptations in xero-halophytic plants and development of transgenic rice plants with enhanced tolerance towards multiple abiotic stresses. After receiving PhD degree, Pareek received the prestigious Post-Doctoral Fellowship by The Rockefeller Foundation, New York, BOYSCAST Fellowship to work at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA and INSA-Royal visiting scientist fellowship to work at University of Cambridge, U.K. He has been an elected Fellow of various Science Academies in India. With over 20 years of teaching experience, more than 200 publications and several international patents, he has been serving as Editor of reputed journals such as Plant Physiology and many others.