B. N. Mallick, born on 1 August 1956 at Jamalpur, a small village in the Indian state of Bihar to Manju Mukherjee and Baidya Nath Mallick. He received his BSc hons at the University of Calcutta in 1978 winning B. K. S. Medal for standing first in City College, Kolkata and earned a master's degree in physiology in 1981 with a University Gold Medal for securing the first rank in the university. While pursuing his master's studies, he simultaneously did a medical course at Calcutta Homoeopathic Medical College and obtained a degree in homeopathic medicine from the Central Council of Homoeopathy. Subsequently, he moved to Delhi for his doctoral studies, and joined the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi as a teaching fellow in 1981. By the time he secured a PhD for his thesis on neurophysiology of sleep-wakefulness in 1986 from AIIMS, he had already worked there as a senior demonstrator during 1983–86. He moved to Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1986 as an assistant professor at the School of Life Sciences and, moved up the ranks to the position ofa professor. He also heads the Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Laboratory, where he hosts a number of scholars and research students. In between, he had five sabbaticals; as a research associate and as a visiting associate professor at University of California, Los Angeles, as a visiting assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and at University of Nice Sophia Antipolis as a guest professor. Mallick is married to Roma Banerjee and the couple has two children. The family lives in the Dakshinapuram campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Career
Mallick carried his doctoral research on sleep and wakefulness on to his later career and worked on the neural mechanisms involved with sleep. His studies combined the electrophysiological and biochemical aspects of rapid eye movement sleep and he established that the increased production of noradrenaline activated neuronal Na+/K+-ATPase, triggering REM sleep-loss and resultant brain excitability. According to him, REM sleep maintains brain excitability and suggested that this unique phase of sleep could be regulated by ceasing REM-off neurons present in the locus coeruleus; his research has been documented by way of texts and articles and ResearchGate, an online repository of scientific articles have listed 108 of them. Besides, he has published four books viz. Rapid Eye Movement Sleep,Sleep-Wakefulness, Environment and Physiology and Rapid Eye Movement Sleep: Regulation and Function; the first listed, which is a monograph co-edited with Shojiro Inoue, is reported to be the first book published on REM sleep. He has also contributed chapters to books published by others and his work has been cited in a number of publications. He is a member of the Neurobiology Task force of the Department of Biotechnology.
