G Narahari Sastry, former chief scientist of the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT), Hyderabad has taken over charge as the Director of CSIR-North East Institute of Science & Technology (CSIR-NEIST), Jorhat in Assam from Samit Chattopadhyay, former Director (in charge) of CSIR-NEIST, on Tuesday.
This was informed in a press communique .
Sastry is a professor of AcSIR in Chemistry and Lifesciences disciplines.
Sastry’s research interests are theroetical and computational chemistry, computational biology, computer aided molecular design and Chemoinformatics. He has made fundamental contributions in the area of non-covalent interactions and developed several important concepts in this area.
His group is interested to apply the data science approaches, and also developing an indigenous software, Molecular Property Diagnostic Suite.
Several of his computational predictions have seen experimental realizations. Besides publishing independently, the group also has active collaboration with several experimentalists and strongly believe that ‘theory-experiment interplay is indispensable’ for the progress of science.
Dr Sastry is a J C Bose National Fellow (2015). He was awarded with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Chemical Sciences in 2011, considered as one of the highest prize for science and engineering in India. Dr Sastry also received National Bioscience award (DBT) in 2009, one of the highest for Lifesciences in India, Swarnajayanthi Fellowship 2005 (DST), B M Birla award for 2001, B C Deb memorial award (2009), CRSI Medal 2011, and AvH fellowship.
He has delivered more than 300 invited lectures which include talks in national and international conferences. He was a visiting professor at IMS, Japan; LMU, Munich, Germany; Jackson State University, USA, and Kyushu Univesity, Japan. He was elected as a Fellow of National Academy of Sciences (FNASc), Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc), Fellow of Association of Biotechnology and Pharmacy, Telangana State Academy of Sciences (Founder Fellow) and Andhra Pradesh Academy of Sciences (FAPAS). He is a regular reviewer to some prestigious journals and also in the editorial board of some journals.
It may be worthwhile to mention here that Dr Sastry has joined the Institute as the 11th director of the Institute after Dr Samit Chattopadhyay who was holding additional charge of the post of Director, CSIR-NEIST apart from being the Director of CSIR-IICB, Kolkata.