National Institute of Science Education and Research - NISER Orissa - NISER

National Institute of Science Education and Research, under the aegis of the Department of Atomic Energy(DAE), has been established with the aim of embedding scientific rigor within larger pedagogic practices in our country. The Institute is affiliated with Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI), Mumbai, a deemed research university that oversees academic programs at Institutions that are part of the DAE structure. NISER campus is situated in 300 acres of land, generously donated by the people of Odisha, in Jatni town, 25 Kms from the centre of the city of Bhubaneswar. The new campus of IIT Bhubaneswar and AIIMS is in the general neighborhood. The main Khorda railway junction is in the immediate vicinity. The Institute started functioning from the current campus in July 2015, nine years since 28th August 2006, when the Prime Minister of India, Shri Dr. Manmohan Singh, announced the proposal for its establishment. The academic program was inaugurated by the Chief Minister of Orissa - Shri Naveen Patnaik on 10th September 2007 at the Institute of Physics campus. 40 students were enrolled for the inaugural batch of the integrated 5 year M.Sc. programme. The Institute at Jatni campus was formally inaugurated on 7th February, 2016, by the Honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri. Narendra Modi.  While we began with the 5 year -Integrated M.Sc. programme in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics, Doctoral guidance has gained substantial traction in the recent past and some of our first scholars have graduated. Current intake in the Masters batch stands at 100, which will eventually be scaled up to an approved 200 in the coming years. First year courses are common courses and students begin to specialize in their chosen stream from the second year. Courses in the Humanities are an integral feature of the Masters curriculum in the first and second year. The near future includes Schools for Computer Science and Earth and Environmental Sciences, planning for which is at an advanced stage. NISER organises a nationwide entrance exam, National Entrance Screening Test (NEST) in concert with UM-DAE CBS, a sister Institute in Mumbai, to decide the Masters intake. The objective is to glean motivated students with an exceptional aptitude for science from the available talent pool. The exam is held on the last Saturday in May every year. A primary objective of the Institute is to train and nurture human resources in the Sciences for the knowledge economies of the future. This is in line with a general shift in geo-political thinking that requires a remedy for sites of knowledge production centred in the west. Such a strategic shift in perspective has been necessitated by the realization that the unique circumstances of our nation demand unique scientific and pedagogic responses. Consequently, we are called upon to question and account for conventional narratives that stake claims to categorizations of science, technology, environment, learning, innovation, design and being. The predominant discourse that seeks to structure these superficially hard categories is predicated on justifications that till date have not moved beyond regimes of hierarchy, control and access. These strictures are an inherent feature of “Institutionalized Science” where Newtonian principles of organizing domains of cognition and mechanisms of representation constrain debates on what new conceptualizations of science ought to be like. More problematically this stifles the potential for interdisciplinarity just when everybody talks its language. This means we continue to think in and with strait jacketed binaries such as natural / artificial or being /thing and perhaps most dangerously science / everything else. The founding of this Institute is rooted in the understanding that the contexts we inhabit are dynamic and in flux, while we have not begun to think in terms of solutions to most of these problems we realize that they exist and that we need to quickly participate in the process of finding out some answers.  NISER recognizes that modern scientific research is carried out in interstices amongst fuzzy domains and blurred boundaries. This entails encouraging a new scientific culture where members of our community attain to an intellectual agility unconstrained by the limitations of disciplinary conventions from the past. Faculty and Students will be given generous material support in the pursuit to realize this objective. Time and conversational space will be devoted to nascent propositions and hypothesis and the significantly small student-faculty ratio, an eventual full strength of 2000 students and 300 faculty, manifests the Institutes investment and hope in the future.