Professor Talat Ahmad, an Earth Scientist of international repute, took over as Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) on Thursday. He was recently appointed by the President of India.In his message to the university community, Ahmad sought inspiration from the founding fathers of JMI, one of the premier institutions of higher learning in the world. He affirmed that Jamia should provide cutting edge learning experience, internationally benchmarked education, intellectual freedom and critical opportunities in frontier areas of contemporary concern.
“Jamia will remain committed to producing intelligent human resource pool for the promotion of economic growth, cultural development, social cohesion, equity and justice. We would need to deliberate upon reconstituting the academic programmes through introduction of choice-based credit system, discuss suitable examination and administrative reforms and consider use of international benchmarks such as citation index and journal impact factor for evaluating the quality of our research. I appeal to all stakeholders in JMI to work collectively and systematically to promote the growth of the institution and make it the first choice for students,” he said.
Ahmad, who did his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and trained himself as a geologist, went on to become a professor in the Department of Geology at University of Delhi. He had served as the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kashmir. He also went through postdoctoral research stints at three foreign universities, University of Cambridge, University of leicester and Nagoya University.