Professor Pulok Kumar Mukherjee is working as the Director, Institute of Bioresources and Sustainable Development (IBSD), an autonomous Institute under Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India consisting of its four centres in North east India: Imphal, Manipur; Aizawl, Mizoram; Gangtok, Sikkim and Shilong, Meghalaya. He has been working on Drug discovery from natural resources with its various translational components on Ethnopharmacology, chemical biology, Ethnobotany, metabolomics linked with chemistry of natural products, therapeutic validation, and related aspects. His has made outstanding contribution for evidence based validation of herbs used in several ancient systems leading to discovery of drugs from nature and from the ancestors. He also worked as the Director of the School of Natural Product Studies, and Head of the Department and Professor at the Dept. of Pharmaceutical Technology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Prof. Mukherjee has more than 29 years of experience enormous expertise on development of Bioeconomy from Bioresources. He has made huge contribution on traditional medicine inspired drug discovery from Indian medicinal plants, Ethno pharmacology and evidence based validation of medicinal herbs to make them available from ‘Farm to Pharma’.
His academic and research career has been outstanding, including globally acclaimed contributions on teaching and research on validation of medicinal plants from Indian systems of medicine, their formulation and standardization, which are useful bio-prospecting tools for the traditional medicine based drug discovery programme. Under his guidance, 33 students have completed their PhD degree. Prof. Mukherjee has delivered more than 230 lectures in international and national conferences/workshops/seminars/brain storming sessions. He has to his credit more than 265 publications in peer reviewed impact journals, several patents. Prof. Mukherjee has authored/edited 8 books and 21 book chapters. Prof. Mukherjee has been included among top 2% scientists in the world by the study reported by Stanford University.
Prof. Mukherjee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Fellow of National Academy of Sciences, India (FNASc), Fellow of National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (FNAAS), Fellow of the West Bengal Academy of Science & Technology (FAScT). He has been awarded with several laurels from Govt. of India and abroad, which includes the prestigious Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellowship from Association of Commonwealth Universities [ACU], UK; TATA innovation fellowship, by Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India; Outstanding Service Award from Drug Information association [DIA], USA; Career Award for Young Teacher from All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), BOYSCAST Fellowship from the Dept of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India; Best Pharmaceutical Scientist, from the Association of Pharmaceutical Teachers’ of India (APTI); Col RN Chopra oration award from Indian Pharmacological Society (IPS); IASTAM Award for Contributions to Development of Ayurvedic and Herbal Pharmaceutics by Indian Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM) and many others.
Prof. Mukherjee is serving as Consulting editor, Pharmacological Research, Elsevier, Associate Editor and Editorial board member of several international and Indian journals including the Phytomedicine plus, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Phytomedicine, Pharmaceutical analysis, Synergy; Phytochemical Analysis, World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, India J Traditional Knowledge and many others. He is associated as advisor/member to different organizations and administrative bodies of Government of India and abroad. He served as the president of the International Society for Ethnopharmacology, Switzerland and the Founder of the Society for Ethnopharamcology, India, serving with the mission of ‘globalizing local knowledge and localizing global technologies’.