The post of BARC director had been lying vacant for the last six months
India's main nuclear weapons lab, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre or BARC, has finally got a new director. Physicist Ajit Kumar Mohanty, currently Director, Physics Group at BARC, has been appointed for a tenure of three years.
The post of BARC director had been lying vacant for the last six months. The appointment comes in the wake of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan after the Pulwama terror attack last month in which 40 CRPF soldiers died.
Mr Mohanty, 59, specializes in basic physics and has considerable experience in particle collisions having worked on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and in trying to unravel the mysteries of Dark Matter.
The physicist was concurrently Director of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata and was instrumental in setting up India's deepest underground laboratory at Jadugoda in the uranium mines that will do experiments to better understand the elusive Dark Matter.
BARC, based in Mumbai, is the country's premier nuclear research facility. It is a multi-disciplinary research centre with extensive infrastructure for advanced research and development covering the entire spectrum of nuclear science, engineering and related areas.