Neera Bhalla Sarin
Former Dean
Jawaharlal Nehru University
India
Biography
Neera Bhalla Sarin has been associated with the School of Life Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University as a faculty member since 1986. She has four decades of research and three decades of teaching experience in the fields of Plant Developmental Biology, Plant Biotechnology, Tissue culture and Genetic Manipulation of Plants for Stress Alleviation and Value Addition. She has established clonal propagation of many recalcitrant plants on a mass scale. This includes horticultural plants, oil seed crops and legumes. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed national and international journals. She has successfully completed many national and international projects funded by different funding agencies, like UGC, CSIR, DBT and DST etc. Her recent work focuses on developing drought and salinity tolerant plants. Work in her laboratory is also going on to produce compounds of medicinal value from plants by using innovative approaches.
Neera Bhalla Sarin served as the Dean, School of Life Sciences and is a member of several boards of study and other important Committees. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India and has been decorated with several awards, e.g Cochran Award in Biotechnology by the U.S.D.A, U.S.A, George Weston Award by the Association of Common Wealth Universities etc. More recently she was nominated by Indian National Science Academy and South African Academy under the bilateral exchange programme to visit South Africa for starting collaboration between the two countries. Apart from India-EU project, she has successfully completed India-USA and India-Swiss projects. Her students have also been awarded, prestigious awards for their excellent work on value addition in plants by International Society.
Research Interest
Genetic manipulation of plants for stress alleviation
Value addition and developmental studies