Shekhar C. Mande


Shekhar C. Mande is a Structural and Computational Biologist. He did his M.Sc. in Physics from University of Nagpur. He holds Doctor of philosophy in Molecular Biophysics, from the Indian Institute of Science. Following his PhD, he joined Prof. Wim G. J. Hol as Post Doctoral Fellow at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. Since 2001, he was senior staff scientist at Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics. Between September 2011 and September 2018 He served as director at National Centre for Cell Science in Pune, India. Currently he serves as the Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research -cum- Secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Govt of India.
He was awarded in 2005 the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the Biological sciences category.

Role in National and International Advisory Bodies

Dr. Mande is current Director General of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India, and the Secretary of Department of Scientific and Industrial Research . Prior to this, he was the Director of NCCS, Pune, an autonomous Institute funded by the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Govt of India.
He served on many advisory committees before moving to Delhi in 2018, including task forces of the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India. He used to Chair the Basic Science task force of the Department of Biotechnology, and was a core member of the Biophysics, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Microbiology task force of the Science and Engineering Research Board of the Department of Science and Technology.
He also served as a member of the management council of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Mumbai as a representative of the Maharashtra State Government. He used to be a member of the Management Councils of the Solapur University and the Savitribai Phule Pune University. He is a member of the Governing Body of the Indo French Centre for Promotion of Advanced Research, and served as a member of the Research Council of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi.
Until December 2019, he served as the chair the National Committee for the International Union of Crystallography of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi.
He used to be the Vice President of Vijnana Bharati, a large voluntary science movement in India with Swadeshi spirit.

Prizes and honours