[4] Established on 29 July 1876 by Mahendralal Sarkar, a private medical practitioner, it focuses on fundamental research in basic sciences.

It is spread over a limited area of 9.5 acres[8] and currently in the process of building an advanced SMART campus at Baruipur.

The present chief editor of the journal is Prof. Subham Majumdar, who is a senior professor in the School of Physical Sciences, IACS.

[13][14] Starting from 2018, after being declared as a deemed university by MHRD, for academic purposes, departments and centres in the Institute are broadly assigned to six major schools, each headed by a Chairperson (School Chair): Apart from these six major schools, there are a few centers, designed to perform specific and cutting-edge research, by the institute administration: At its inception, the IACS was headed by a president, with the Honorary Secretary responsible for the day-to-day running of the Society.

[72] At the university, Debashis Mukherjee developed the Mk-MRCC method to account for electron correlations in molecular systems.