Bhubaneswar: Ajit Kumar Mohanty has been appointed director of India’s key nuclear weapon lab, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC).
An order by the Ministry of Personnel and Training said that Mohanty will hold the post for a period of three years.
The top post of the country’s premier multi-disciplinary nuclear research facility in Mumbai had been lying vacant for six months and this appointment gains significance against the backdrop of heightened tension between India and Pakistan following the Pulwama attack.
Mohanty, 59, specializes in basic physics and has considerable experience in particle collisions, having worked on Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and in trying to unravel the mysteries of Dark Matter. He is currently the Director of Physics Group at BARC and also heads the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata. He is reported to have been instrumental in setting up India’s deepest underground laboratory at Jadugoda uranium mines.
