Vice-President M. Hamid Ansari will inaugurate the Inter-University Centre for Biosciences at a function at the seminar hall of Kannur University on the Mangattuparamba campus here at 3.30 p.m. on July 10.
Announcing this at a press conference here on Friday, university Vice-Chancellor Michael Tharakan said Governor R.S. Gavai, who was also the university's Chancellor, and Education Minister M.A. Baby, who was the Pro-Chancellor, would attend the function.
Prof. Tharakan said the centre was being created from the Department of Biotechnology and Microbiology of the university. The Higher Education Department of the State government had envisioned the inter-university centres as centres of excellence in universities in the State. They were expected to occupy premier positions in the areas of research and teaching in science and social sciences.
He said the centre would have a scientific advisory committee, a finance committee, a stakeholders committee and an evaluation committee. The university Syndicate had declared the permanent faculty of the department as the adjunct faculty of the centre and department professor M. Haridas as honorary director of the centre. He said the centre would concentrate on becoming a centre of excellence in drug-related research and herbal product development. It would conduct the postgraduate diploma in drug discovery and designing and in course of time would undertake tasks such as advanced level training programmes for researchers in automated proteomics and genomics.
The concept of the centre was developed by the University Grants Commission for providing state-of-the-art equipment and facilities to researchers working in different universities. The centre being developed here would be able to attract funding from not only the State and the Union governments but also from other funding agencies, he said.
It would have a herbal garden of its own and independent buildings, laboratories and library facilities, he said. The herbal garden would be named after E.K. Janaki Ammal, renowned ethnobotanist from Thalassery and the former Director-General of the Botanical Survey of India.
