Bengaluru :

The scientific landscape in India must move in an organic way towards an environment that encourages multi-disciplinary research so as to address the challenges that the country and the world face, scientists say.

G Mugesh from the department of inorganic and physical chemistry, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), said: “There is no doubt that people working with different interfaces need to be encouraged. The challenges before us have shown that just one discipline is not enough, for example, to tackle several diseases that the world at large and India face.”

Mugesh was conferred the National Prizes for Interfaces between Chemistry and Biology (2017), instituted by the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru, in collaboration with CNR Rao Education Foundation. The award is donated by AVRA Laboratories, Hyderabad.

This year’s award is also being conferred on Sandeep Verma of Indian Institute of Technology – Kanpur.

“Compared to 20 years ago, when I joined IIT-Kanpur after my PhD and postdoctoral research in the US, there is a lot of change. All my training in the US was on how to do multi-disciplinary research and when I returned I found that the scientific landscape in India was still very puritan. Researchers like working in their respective areas and seldom interacted with other disciplines.”

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City News> Bangalore News / TNN / June 06th, 2017