New Delhi: Haryana’s Ashoka University, primarily known for its liberal arts courses, is expanding its science department with a dedicated campus in Rajiv Gandhi Education City, Sonepat.
The private university is collaborating with some of the most prestigious centers of learning in India and abroad, including the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Cambridge University in the UK and University at Buffalo in the US.
“You cannot do science alone, you need to discuss and interact with other institutions,” Pramath Raj Sinha, founder and trustee of Ashoka University, told ThePrint.
Currently, the university offers a few programs in the sciences, but with expansion, the founders plan to offer a “unique blend” of research in the sciences and humanities. The university campus will occupy approximately 100 acres of land once work on the new wing – which includes a science park and laboratories – is completed.
“Multidisciplinary science is where we want to stand out, we want to bring physicists, chemists, computer scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, psychologists under one roof and make them work together. We think that in legacy institutions It is difficult to bring the level of multidisciplinaryness. Since we are new to this, it will come naturally to us…”, Sinha said.
“The plan was always to have a full liberal arts education, which includes science … Of course, we always knew we were going to do science. It’s just that we sequenced it in a way that Humanities came first and now sciences,” he added.
Sinha told ThePrint that instead of offering professional programs such as engineering, MBA and law, the university wants to focus on technological liberal arts such as humanities, natural sciences and computer science.
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Science Park, School for Advanced Computing
A ‘School of Biosciences’ on emerging areas of health and biosciences, a ‘School for Mathematics and Physical Sciences’ and a ‘School for Advanced Computing’ on Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy will be offered at the Science Campus of Ashoka University . on computer science.
A science park with a ‘Center for Disease Biology’ will also come up on the new campus, with a specific focus on emerging infectious diseases, human immunology, antimicrobial resistance, and artificial intelligence and machine learning in clinical and epidemiological settings.
The Center for Inflammation Biology and the Center for Synthetic Biology are also in the pipeline to study the role of inflammation in infection and cancer, focusing on understanding biochemical events in living cells at high resolution and accuracy in time and space. Huh.
The university expects students to start participating in research at the School of Biosciences by 2023.
Meanwhile, the university is also expanding its computer science program and will launch a ‘School for Advanced Computing’ this year.
Sinha told ThePrint that the university is recruiting teachers from across the world. Former IIT Delhi professor Shubhashish Banerjee, who teaches computer science, and Anurag Agarwal, former director of the Delhi-based CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, are among the faculty who have already joined.
(Edited by Amritansh Arora)
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