page_title: T. R. Sharma
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: T. R. Sharma / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of CSHL in the fall of 2008
context_page_description: Tilak Raj Sharma is an Indian plant biologist, the executive director of the National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, and the chief executive officer of the Center of Innovative and Applied Bioprocessing, both autonomous institutes under the Department of Biotechnology. Known for his studies in the fields of genomics and plant disease resistance, Sharma is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences in 2007.
context_section_description: T. R. Sharma was born on 20 May 1965 at Hamirpur in the north-east Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. After completing early schooling at the Government High School in Ladrour in 1980, he joined the College of Agriculture of Chaudhary Sarwan Kumar Himachal Pradesh Krishi Vishvavidyalaya (CSK HPKV) from where he earned a BSc in agriculture in 1985, an MSc in 1987 and a PhD in 1990, working on a Dr. K. S. Krishnan fellowship from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Subsequently, he started his career by joining CSK HPKV as an assistant professor in 1991 where he served in various capacities until 2014. During this period, he did his post-doctoral studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada from 1994 to 1996 as a research associate of the Department of Biotechnology, held the positions of a senior scientist from 1999 to 2007, and of a principal scientist until 2014 when he was appointed as the principal scientist on deputation and the project director of the National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, housed in the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. He served the research centre for almost three years and moved to the National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI), an autonomous institute under the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in Mohali, in January 2017 as its executive director, a position he holds to date. Simultaneously, he also serves as the chief executive officer of the Center of Innovative and Applied Bioprocessing (CIAB), another DBT institution in Mohali. He also had two stints in the US in 2001 and 2004, as a visiting scientist at the Genome Research Centre of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where he worked on Rice genome sequencing, genome sequence finishing and genome analysis.
  Sharma resides in the Executive Director's Residence in NABI Campus at Knowledge City in Mohali, Punjab.
caption: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
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