# Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata (known as IISERK or IISER KOLKATA) is an public autonomous Research institute in science and education field located in Mohanpur near the town of Kalyani in Nadia, West Bengal, India. It was established by the Ministry of Education, Government of India in 11 July 2006 and promoted to the status of an Institute of National Importance in 2012 vide the NIT Amendment Act. It is one of seven Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, and was one of the first IISERs to be established along with IISER Pune. It is considered to be one of the leading institutes of India in terms of research output. In 2022, it was ranked fourth among the academic institutions in India by the Nature Index in 2022. The current director of IISER Kolkata is Prof Sunil Kumar Khare.

## Organisation and administration

The institute hosts the multi-institutional Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India (CESSI) with participating scientists from ISRO and other astronomy institutes and is involved in research associated with national space science missions. Other centres include the Centre for Advanced Functional Materials, National Centre for High Pressure Studies and a Centre for Climate and Environment Studies. It also has a field station for ecological, environmental and field studies, a greenhouse, a broadband seismological observatory. The institute jointly runs the Göttingen-Kolkata: Open shell systems (G-KOSS) in fundamentals of molecular spintronics with University of Göttingen. The institute also hosts the Dirac Supercomputer, which was inaugurated in April 2019. The performance of this supercomputing facility is 78.8 Teraflops.

## Departments and initiatives

* Biological Sciences
* Chemical Sciences
* Computational and Data Sciences
* Earth Sciences
* Humanities and Social Sciences
* Mathematics and Statistics
* Physical Sciences

## Laboratories and research centers

* Centre for Advanced Functional Materials (CAFM)
* Centre for Climate and Environmental Studies (CCES)
* Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India (CESSI)
* National Centre for High Pressure Studies (NCHPS)
* Center for Artificial Intelligence (CFAI)

## Events

The college organizes a major annual festival, Inquivesta, which is promoted as one of the first and the biggest science festivals of the country.
Inquivesta sees a footfall of 1000+, and has been visited by artists such as Zakir Khan (comedian), Sapan Verma, Nalayak (band) and Anubhav Singh Bassi. It has also received brands such as Baskin-Robbins and Domino's Pizza as its previous partners IISER Kolkata has also been hosting VIJYOSHI (the national science camp), along with IISc Bangalore and the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, since 2014.
The institute also has an E-Cell for promoting an entrepreneurial culture in the student body.

## Rankings

It was ranked fourth among the academic institutions in India by the Nature Index in the 2022 tables, and thirteenth in the 2023 tables.
Internationally, the institute was ranked 251–300 among institutes in emerging economies, by the Times Higher Education's "Emerging Economies University Rankings 2022".
In India, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) ranked the institute 61 overall in 2024 and 38 among research institutes.