New Delhi, Nov. 12: Calcutta-educated biophysicist Samir Brahmachari today took over as director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the country’s largest civilian research network with 37 laboratories.

Brahmachari, who studied at St Xavier’s and Calcutta University, has been at the vanguard of India’s genomics initiatives.

The CSIR had been waiting for a full-time director-general for more than 10 months since Raghunath Mashelkar laid down office on December 31 last year. Days earlier, V. Prakash, a food-technology scientist picked to succeed Mashelkar and working as his understudy, had declined the post on health grounds.

Brahmachari, 55, as director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, has over the past decade helped shape India’s research efforts in human genome science, forged public-private partnerships in modern biology, and mentored dozens of young researchers.

“The CSIR has great strengths. We have extraordinary people in our labs around the country. We’ll need to integrate research disciplines,” he told The Telegraph today.

The council, whose budget for 2007-08 is Rs 1,860 crore, is pursuing research across myriad fields from aerospace and biotechnology to food science, electronics and oceanography.

Some scientists and policy-makers had argued in the past that the CSIR needs to reorient itself. Even council insiders have pointed out that only a few of its laboratories are doing world-class research.

“The most important thing for an organisation is a vision to work in future space,” said Brahmachari, who spent two decades at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, first as student and then as a faculty member.

In the mid-1990s, he was among a group of Indian biologists who argued that foreigners should not be allowed to use genetic material from India for research without agreements that ensure any benefits would be shared with India.

Brahmachari said he owed the start of his research career to senior faculty members at the IISc who had in the early 1970s accepted him as a PhD scholar despite a second class in MSc.