Eligibility of Faculty in International Standard : SAU

South Asian University, only university in India that follow International Standard : Have a look for required qualification in faculty recruitment

Ageism in academic jobs in India in Nature India Blog

Ageism is a serious problem for Indian academia.
Several issues in policy are daunting the progress of Indian academia as mentioned :
1. "Many academic institutions have no guidelines on the role, involvement and career development of academic fellows."
2. "Many academics fail to understand the role and potential of fellows like me and often consider them just as an extended postdoc — not as a long-term prospect or potential collaborator. Hence, I did not get enough of an opportunity to teach and to mentor PhD students."
3. surely some vogus and callous advices are there without judging the nature of research: "for improving my faculty application and to enhance my chances of a secure job — this was to publish my current research: i) without foreign authors; and ii) as senior or first author in more prestigious journals such as Science, Nature or PNAS. Whilst the first is possible, the second is easier said than done."
 &&& "collecting and publishing groundbreaking ecology data in top journals can take years longer than other disciplines".
4. and the most serious problem "The journals I have been publishing in are not familiar to some of the members of recruitment panels I’ve met with. I have even been asked if ‘Ibis’ and ‘Parasites & Vectors’ were proper journals."

see Subhra Priyadarshini post in Nature India Blog indigenus, dated 20-July-2017

Blue or red pill: Jobs in the age of artificial intelligence - Need for Alternative Models To Built Talent is Vital

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more sophisticated, the threat that this automation will displace a wide number of jobs is very real. This obviously creates a distressing picture for many of us.

However, evidence shows that if technology really destroyed jobs, there would have been no work today for anyone. The technological revolution we have seen in the past 30 years has been unparalleled and exponential, and yet there are more jobs today and probably better salaries than before. Therefore, we need to shift the dialogue from the type of jobs that can be protected to a conversation about jobs that can and will be created.

As an example, the banking industry has undergone changes over the years, where some of the traditional tasks like passbook updating, cash deposit, verification of KYC details and salary uploads have been automated for operational efficiency. The focus is shifting from transactions to advisory and consultation. In the near term, AI is not going to replace 'judgment' aspects and therefore dealing with complex cases, which are high-value in any domain including banking, will be what is required. Employees will need to build skills on reading data, making sense out of the reams of analysis that will become available and be able to provide solutions that work.

Across industries, though some jobs will be automated in the next few years, jobs with higher skill levels will still be in demand. This would mean a focused approach towards reskilling the existing workforce and preparing for the future. A good education will be imperative to acquire skills that are competitive in the evolved labour market. This also means that the current system of education will need a rather extensive, and much needed, overhaul.

We will need to think about what this will mean for us as a society from the policy point of view. What can we do to ensure that opportunities for upward mobility are not hindered with the change in market dynamics? We will probably need to look at making it easier for entrepreneurs to start new firms and employ people in new forms of work.

As employers, we would need to think of alternative models to build talent. In his book Humans Need Not Apply, Jerry Kaplan also proposes a so-called "job mortgage" as a new type of financial instrument through which employers, vocational schools and colleges would have an incentive to collaborate in a new way. He suggests (among other things) that employers can commit to an intent to employ an individual in the future if that person commits to acquire a specific set of skills over a certain time frame.

In the new future, we would have to look at more such innovative thinking to manage the challenge. Governments and businesses will need to come up with a concerted approach on education, skills and employment and will have to work together. This itself can create a talent revolution that we need for an AI-driven future.

Companies are already using or testing AI and machine-learning systems and the emergence of entire categories of new, uniquely human jobs has been identified. These roles are not replacing old ones. They are novel, and require skills and training that have no precedents.


It is important to realise that humans are not really being left behind. As computers become more and more intelligent, humans will evolve in parallel, possibly with the help of embedded intelligent chips and BCIs (Brain-Computer Interfaces). The focus, therefore, should be to create systems that let humans combine what they are good at — asking the right questions and interpreting results — with what machines are good at: computation, analysis, and statistics using large datasets. We cannot peer into the uncertain future but we can certainly think about an exciting present which has a real potential of creating great value for the business.

What individuals can do is to be constantly in touch with the progress of technology in their field. This will help identify how our roles could possibly evolve and the next step is then to make sure we develop the skills required to step into the newly created role requirements.

Jobs in the AI age will clearly be violet pills!

Times of India Jul 12, 2017, 05:40 PM IST By Madhavi Lall  

 Do administrators in education sector is concern or competent to judge this?

Design the Implementation Strategy For Development of Systems Biology/Medicine for Developing Countries

SSBTR members are thinking about the importance, bottleneck of implementation strategies of Translating Systems Biology or Systems Medicine for developing countries. They have proposed some strategic planning to overcome the hurdles and to implement it. Their thinking are shared in recent two articles:
1. Bottleneck towards the Practice of Multi-/Interdisciplinary Nature of Systems Pharmacology and Systems Medicine: Experience from India, Advances in Pharmacology and Clinical Trials, 1(1): APCT-MS-ID-00010, Pages 1-7.
Abstract. Presently medicine and clinical practices are viewed with systems approach. This makes a paradigm shift in the academic pursuits of the subject pharmacology, hence pharmacology with systems based approach is known as Systems Pharmacology. If Systems Pharmacology can be practised in a proper manner it would modify the future medicine and health care system. Since towards its accomplishment, it requires multidisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary framework and however, several policy related problems may hamper its development. Some of the problems exist globally while some others are mainly India specific. Currently, India is considered to be the superpower among the south Asian countries and therefore, it may be the representative of the developing countries. Hence, development of the subject in Indian perspective is vital in the management of different diseases in the global context as well. Here we discuss the problems that confront the development and growth of the subject in India and propose some methods that may come out as solutions. Apparently it seems that the major bottlenecks are mistrust, issue of nepotism and bias in the academic pursuit, but the inner reasons are the fund crunch, problem in recruitment policy, ignorance regarding the global trend of science and its implementation in policy.


2. Importance and Implementation Strategies of Systems Medicine Education in India, Annals of Systems Biology, 1(1): 1-12
Abstract. Though the inevitable outcome of Systems Biology (SB) may be directed to seek answers to the medical problems; however, due to its expanding horizon and flexibility, different academic institutions across the globe focus on different aspects of SB in their educational curriculum. Hence, some European educationists propose for streamlining of different course curriculum. Here such issues are discussed with respect to their translation towards medicine and health care system i.e., Systems Medicine (SM) under the perspectives of developing countries. Conventional molecule centric high-throughput technology driven practices of SB that are being carried out in Western world may not fit under the perspective of developing countries due to associated high cost. Streamlining approach for SB course curriculum would shift the multi-/interdisciplinary (MDID) framework of SB towards more rigidity and narrow down the scope for the development of the subject in developing countries. Since independence of India, policy was adopted so that field dependent (FD) cognition has got priority. Present educational policy makers are trained with that direction; hence, they remain ignorant about the importance of other facets of education. Still there is some unawareness regarding the long-term effect about the implemented policy for country’s development. Practice of SM is the need of time to address the regional and local problems. Development of domain knowledge and analytical methods should be prioritized for developing countries. This would invariably take an initiative towards further development of computational methods, information and web technology and automation; thereby its vastness and expanding horizons would be appreciated. Such activities may also shift the existing health care paradigm in near future. Learning process and education on SM through research could be the ideal path for the development of the subject. This, in turn, may blur the demarcating lines across and between the far disciplines and make a paradigm shift in the educational system across the globe.

Changing Paradigm in Higher Education

This discussion looks at the role and potential of a growing class of professionals at U.S. colleges and universities today: scholar-practitioners or alternative-academics. Scholar-practitioners are products of a changing higher education landscape where core faculty lines are declining while contract and adjunct positions are growing in tandem with the proliferation of specialized campus services.  For hybrid scholar-practitioners of international higher education, opportunities exist to leverage their exposure to data and experiential knowledge in order to broaden and deepen the discussion in an enterprise increasingly attracting significant research attention. For details see ---> Bernhard Streitwieser and Anthony C. Ogden, "The Scholar-Practitioner Debate in International Higher Education", International Higher Education, 86: Summer 2016.

This article examines whether domestic or international mobility of scientists have positive effect on the productivity or impact of their work. We analyzed 100 top producing authors from 7 disciplines and found that mobility between at least two affiliations increases both output (number of publications) and impact (number of citations). However, mobility between countries does not seem to have a positive impact as domestic affiliation mobility. For detail see ---> Gali Halevi, Henk F. Moed, Judit Bar-Ilan "Does Research Mobility Have an Effect on Productivity and Impact?" International Higher Education, 86: Summer 2016.
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Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.

Development on Systems Biology : Strategic Planning for Education

Comments from Europe

• Cvijovic et al (2016) Strategies for structuring interdisciplinary education in Systems Biology: an European perspective, Systems Biology & Applications, 2:16011, doi: 10.1038/npjsba.2016.11 

Comments from India

• Comments from Indian experts are also important, as India not only holds the central position in South Asian countries but also it holds the wide variations of cultural and ethnic diversity. For details see SSBTR site.

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Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.
Secretary, SSBTR

Skill-sets for Systems Biology Job

Have a look for the required skill-set as on Nature Jobs 2015 Aug. This is for Systems Biology job aspirants.

Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.
Secretary, SSBTR