Research
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Dr. Purnendu Chatterjee is the Founder and Chairman of The Chatterjee Group (TCG) & Chancellor of TCG CREST Deemed to be University. Founded in 1989, TCG is a premier private equity firm, with investments and operations spanning several continents and industries. From 1989 to 2000, Dr. Chatterjee had been closely associated with Soros Fund Management, and he served as an Investment Advisor to entities in the Quantum Group of Funds for over 13 years. In this role, Dr. Chatterjee had been responsible for investments of over $3 billion around the world.

As a Partner at McKinsey & Company Inc., Dr. Chatterjee advised leading companies on strategic, organizational, and operational issues.

Under Dr. Chatterjee’s leadership, TCG has garnered over 3 decades of experience in leveraged acquisitions of operating companies and other private-equity transactions. TCG has compiled a highly successful investment record in India in a number of key areas, including: Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Information Technology Services, Software, Engineering, Petrochemicals, Chemicals, and Real Estate.

As one of the primary founders of the Indian School of Business, Dr. Chatterjee is passionately committed to promoting Entrepreneurship as the key to India’s economic development. He is a trustee of The Asia Society and is a member of the College of Engineering Advisory Board at the University of California, Berkeley. He also serves on the Boards of several Group portfolio companies.

Dr. Chatterjee received a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley.

Malabika Sarkar is Mentor & Vice-Chancellor (Officiating) TCG CREST. Her role and responsibilities include providing mentorship to the senior leadership team in policy making, to help align the organizational structure of TCG CREST to its strategy and goals, and to provide guidance in shaping TCG CREST into a research-first university.

She was Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, Delhi NCR, from 2019 to 2023 and Professor of English. As Principal Advisor and Professor of English at Ashoka University from 2015, she was additionally Ashoka’s first Dean of Faculty and Research (2016-2019) before becoming Vice-Chancellor in 2019.

She was First Vice-Chancellor of Presidency University in Kolkata (2011-14), responsible for the transition of the institution from Presidency College (established as Hindu College in 1817) to Presidency University.

She was earlier a Professor of English at Jadavpur University, a member of the University Council (1980-85), a panel member of NAAC, and member of other UGC committees.

An alumna of Cambridge University, later Visiting Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, she was elected a Foundation Fellow at Clare Hall in 2025.

Primarily a Miltonist, her academic field is Early Modern Literature and the History of Science. Her other area of interest is Romantic Literature and culture and she was the Founder President of the Centre for Studies in Romantic Literature (CSRL) from 1994 to 2018, directing its annual international conferences for twenty five years. She has presented her work at various conferences in the UK and North America.

Her books include Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Moneta’s Veil: Essays on Nineteenth Century Literature (Delhi: Pearson, 2009), The Bengal Club in History (Kolkata: The Bengal Club, 2006) apart from book chapters and many scholarly articles in refereed journals. Book chapters include “Astronomical Signs in Paradise Lost” in Milton and the Ends of Time ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), “Milton’s Global Impact: India” in A New Companion to Milton ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), “Yeats, Kipling and the Haven-Finding Art” in Kipling and Yeats at 150 ed. Pramodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan (Oxford & New York: Routledge 2019). Her article on “The Magic of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” published in Renaissance Studies, Vol.12, No.2, June 1988 was republished in Shakespeare Criticism Yearbook 1998 (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2000) in their “Selection of the Year’s Most Noteworthy Studies of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry”.

She is an invited Fellow of the English Association (FEA), UK, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the journal European Romantic Review.

Since 2014, she is also President of the Women’s Coordinating Council (WCC), West Bengal, founded in 1960, the apex women’s organization in the state with more than 70 affiliated NGOs.

Saibal Chattopadhyay has joined TCG CREST as a Director, Academic Programmes from April 2026. Prior to that, he served as a Professor with the Operations Management Group at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, India, for the last twenty-nine years. During this period, he has been directly involved in various operational, tactical, and strategic roles for institutional transformation. As the Dean (Programme Initiatives) and also as a member of the Board of Governors, he has been involved in evolving new policies including curriculum review, faculty feedback, faculty work norm, and collaboration with premier business schools to enhance the faculty productivity and the brand image of the Institute. During his five-year tenure as the Director of the Institute, he played a more direct role towards greater internationalization of the Institute and its journey to excellence. The institute, during this period, has achieved the much coveted triple crown in accreditation from AMBA, AACSB and EQUIS as the first IIM in the country. An associate editor of the journal Sequential Analysis, Dr. Chattopadhyay also serves in the editorial boards of some other international journals. Dr. Chattopadhyay received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Calcutta, India and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Statistics from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, U.S.A. His research interests are in Sequential methods in estimation, and in selection and ranking problems; Inference on finite population and survey sampling; Multi-stage sampling methods in environmental health and in clinical studies.

Professor Pankaj Agrawal received his PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle. After spending more than 25 years at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, he joined CQuERE. He has broad interest in quantum information, including quantum correlations, quantum nonlocality, quantum communication, and quantum cryptography, etc. He also works on various aspects of high energy physics phenomenology.

Prof Goutam Mukherjee is the Dean of Mathematics and Computer Sciences and Director of the Institute for Advancing Intelligence (IAI). He previously served as a Professor in the Stat-Math Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata. He served as the Professor-in-Charge of the Theoretical Statistics and Mathematics Division of ISI, the Dean of Studies of the Indian Statistical Institute, and a member of several others administrative committees. He earned his Ph.D. from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, in 1992, an M.Sc. in Pure Mathematics from Burdwan University and a B.Sc. (Honours) in Mathematics from Hooghly Mohsin College. He stood first in first class in both B. Sc. and M. Sc. Examinations.

His research interests span algebraic topology, transformation groups, algebraic deformation theory, and the theory of Lie groupoids and Lie algebroids. He has published more than 45 research papers in national and international journals. Prof. Mukherjee has guided several Ph.D. scholars in areas ranging from Algebraic Deformation theory of non-associative algebras, Equivariant Cohomolgy, Nambu structures and Lie-Filippov Algebroid to Equivariant Deformation theory, contributing to the development of the next generation of mathematical researchers.

Cross-sectoral experience of over 40 years in the health sector spanning across hospitals, primary care, training of health human resources, translational inter-disciplinary frugal healthtech innovation, clinical informatics software development, last-mile digital healthcare and founding institutions. Among the top 40 global changemakers in 2025 (Stanford Graduate School of Business & Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability).

• President, Foundation for Innovations in Health (FIH)
• Consultant, International Finance Corporation (member of World Bank Group)
• Serial entrepreneur
• Former Professor, School of Medical Science & Technology, IIT Kharagpur
• Former Consultant, Assam Advanced Healthcare Innovation Institute (AAHII), IIT Guwahati

Dr. Anirban Chakraborty is a member of the Leadership Team with the specific position of Registrar and heading the Research & Development, to enable and facilitate the overall Research activities consistent with TCG CREST’s mission. He supervises all aspects of RPMG’s functioning, including helping faculty/researchers in obtaining Research Grants, Grant Management, Research Infrastructure Management, Research Communications, IPR Management of all existing and intra-verticals research. He also supports advance planning for research in new verticals to be created in CREST.

Anirban has several years of experience as an Academic and Research Administrator in India. Previously he was the Director (Research) and Assistant Vice-President (Research & Academic Development) at Ashoka University, where he was deeply involved in concretising the university’s academic and research administration (2017- 23). Anirban was the Assistant Registrar and then officiated as the Deputy Registrar at Presidency University (Kolkata, India), where he worked closely with the leadership team and participated in the task of transforming a great College of more than two hundred years old into a twenty-first-century Research University (2012-17).

Anirban completed his BSc. (Hons) in Physics, MSc and PhD in Nanoscience from University of Calcutta. During PhD, his research interests were in nanoparticle synthesis and applications, reaction kinetics study, and sophisticated imaging techniques. Further, Anirban is interested in research in Higher Education Management and Policy issues. He publishes scholarly articles and regularly participates in conferences and panel discussions in the field of higher education. He is a recipient of the IRMI grant by the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance and the 3CS grant at Ashoka University.

Mr. Gourkrishna Pattanayak serves as the Finance Officer (officiating) at TCG CREST Deemed University, bringing decades of distinguished experience in public finance and higher education institutions. He holds a B.Com (Honours) and M.Com from Calcutta University, is a Chartered Accountant, and has completed an MBA from Jadavpur University, alongside advanced training in financial and project management, including World Bank compliance frameworks.

He began his career with the West Bengal Audit and Accounts Service and went on to shape financial governance in academia, with key tenures at Vidyasagar University and as Finance Officer at Jadavpur University. There, he led a landmark financial turnaround—transforming an overdraft position into a sustainable corpus fund—and built robust systems that enabled institutional growth and research excellence.

Mr. Pattanayak has overseen complex, high-value projects funded by UGC, DST, AICTE, and MHRD (including TEQIP and RUSA), ensuring rigorous financial, statutory, and legal compliance. Known for his strategic foresight and disciplined financial stewardship, he plays a pivotal role in strengthening institutional resilience and enabling mission-driven academic ecosystems.