Rajesh Gokhale Monday took over as the Secretary, Department of Science and Technology (DST). This will be an additional charge as he is currently serving as the Secretary, Department of Biotechnology (DBT), a position held since October 2021.
Last month, the union government announced that S. Chandrasekhar , the incumbent DST Secretary, will be relieved from his services and will return to his parent institute in Hyderabad, in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). His appointment was originally till the end of 2023.
Dr Gokhale (born 16/01/1967) did his graduation in B.Sc. Chemistry from Delhi University and M.Sc. in Biotechnology from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Bombay, Mumbai, India in 1990. He then obtained his PhD from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore in the area of Protein Folding and Stability and Postdoctoral studies in Polyketide Synthases and secondary Metabolite Biosynthesis from Stanford University, USA. He moved back to India to join faculty of National Institute of Immunology (NII), Delhi in the year 1999 as Staff Scientist-IV. He subsequently served as the director of the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology from 2009 to 2016, before returning to the NII in 2017. He also briefly served as the director-in-charge of the NII in 2021, and in September moved on deputation to the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, as a professor.He has worked extensively on tuberculosis and is credited to have developed the Long-chain Fatty acyl-AMP ligases (FAAL).
