The Department of Botany (DoB) was established in 1947 with about 50 students and a couple of faculty under the leadership of Dr. J. J. Chinoy, and completed 75 glorious years in 2022. Since its inception, the Department of Botany has remained at the forefront of teaching and research in Botany, both Internationally and Nationally.
The dynamic and visionary contributions of several renowned botanists such as Prof. Panchanan Maheshwari, Prof. B. M. Johri, Prof. H. Y. Mohan Ram, Prof. S. C. Maheshwari, earned the Department international recognition for its teaching and research in plant morphology, development and embryology. Several alumni of the DoB have subsequently been highly successful in their respective area of academics and administration. Alumni have gone on to become acclaimed teachers, scientists, administrators and managers in corporate institutions.
The department offers a two-year M.Sc program, and a doctoral research program, and has excellent teaching and research facilities. At present, the Department has 19 faculties, more than 200 M. Sc students (M.Sc Previous + M.Sc Final), 100 Ph. D students, and several post-doctoral scholars. The department is supported by a dedicated non-teaching administrative and laboratory support staff.
The Department of Botany is one among the 10 departments within the Faculty of Sciences at University of Delhi.
Current thrust areas of teaching and research provide students with substantial exposure and hands-on training in a variety of subject areas in plant biology. The disciplines studied include plant structure, growth and development, plant molecular biology, physiology and biochemistry, plant pathology, ecology, genetics, systematics, evolution, bioinformatics and transgenic technology on a variety of taxa ranging from algae, fungi and other microbes, bryophytes and vascular plants (ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms including crop plants) at the cellular, organismal, community and ecosystem levels. This unique mix of classical as well as modern areas of plant science research has greatly benefitted the students and scholars.
Faculty members are experts in their respective fields of research and teaching, and their contributions are evident through their high quality research publications, book chapters and recognitions by various national and international academic bodies such as Commonwealth Foundation, British Council and The Linnean Society of London (U.K.), DAAD and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), UNESCO/ROSTSCA, INSA, National Academy of Science, UGC etc.
Based on exemplary performance, the Department was recognized as a UGC Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) in Botany and also as a Centre of Excellence. In the recent past, the Department received further assistance under the COSIST Programme and DST-FIST program.
The department has also received prestigious and highly competitive grants from National and International funding agencies including UGC, CSIR, DBT, SERB-DST, ICMR, DoE, World Bank, Humboldt foundation, GEF-UNEP. In addition, the Department organizes training programmes for teachers, scientists and research scholars in frontier areas of plant sciences on a regular basis, and has hosted several National and International conferences.
A brief profile of the Department is here and of the faculties can be found here.
Download the Department brochure here