Akhilesh Kumar Tyagi

[4] Returning to India, Tyagi re-joined the University of Delhi at their South Campus in 1988 as a member of faculty of the Department of Plant Molecular Biology and became a professor in 1994.

[5] He was appointed as the head of the department in 1992 and after serving in that position for three years, he became the chair of the Board of Research Studies, Interdisciplinary and Applied Sciences from 1995 to 2003.

In 2005, he became the director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Plant Genomics of Delhi University and after serving ICGP till 2009, he moved to National Institute of Plant Genome Research, an autonomous research institution of the Department of Biotechnology as its director, and held position till 2016.

[6] One of the major contributions of Tyagi has been his efforts towards crop improvement in India using molecular physiology, genomics, and transgenics[4] and his work is reported to have assisted in widening our understanding of neo- and sub-functionalization of regulatory gene families in plants during evolution.

[11] He has mentored over 120 post-doctoral, doctoral, master or other research scholars in his career[7] and has delivered more than 300 invited lectures in national and international seminars and conferences.

[4] He was the coordinator for the establishment of the Centre for Plant Molecular Biology at South Campus and chaired two task forces namely Task Force on Human Resource Development of the Department of Biotechnology (2003–06) and the Program Advisory Committee for Pant Sciences of the Department of Science and Technology (2007–15).