Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata


Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata is an autonomous public research university in science and education field located in Nadia district, West Bengal, India. It was established by the Ministry of Human Resource Development in 2006 and promoted to the status of an Institute of National Importance in 2012 vide the NIT Amendment Act. It is one of seven Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, and was the first of the IISERs to be established along with IISER Pune. It is considered to be one of the leading institutes of India in terms of research output, and was ranked 8th in the country by the Nature Index.

Admissions

Admission is done through the three channels open for all IISERs:
From 2019 onwards it was declared on behalf of all IISERs that a maximum 25% of the of the seats are assigned to KVPY and JEE-Advanced students. Students applying through SCBs also need to take Common IISER Aptitude Test, and are assigned by merit on this test.

Organisation

The institute has five major departments: biological sciences; chemical sciences; earth sciences; mathematics and statistics; and physical sciences.
The institute hosts the Centre of Excellence for Space Sciences and a Max Planck-DST Partner Group of Chemical Ecology funded by the Max Planck Society. It also has a field station for ecological, environmental and field studies, and a broadband seismological observatory. The institute jointly runs the Göttingen-Kolkata: Open shell systems in fundamentals of molecular spintronics with Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
The institute also hosts the Dirac Supercomputer, which was inaugurated on April 2019.The Dirac cluster has both GNU and Intel compilers. The performance of the Dirac Supercomputing facility is 78.8 Teraflops which includes 60 Teraflops of CPU) and 4×4.7 Teraflops of GPU.

Events

The college organizes a major annual festival, Inquivesta, which is promoted as one of the first and the biggest science fest of the country.
Inquivesta sees a footfall of 1000+, and has been visited by artists such as Zakir Khan, Sapan Verma, Nalayak and Anubhav Singh Bassi. It has also received brands such as Baskin-Robbins and Domino's Pizza as its previous partners
IISER Kolkata has also been hosting VIJYOSHI, along with IISc Bangalore and the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, since 2014.

Rankings

Internationally, the institute was ranked 301–350 among institutes in emerging economics, by the Times Higher Education "Emerging Economies University Rankings 2020".
In India, the National Institutional Ranking Framework ranked the institute 29 overall in 2020, and 25 among universities in 2019.
The Nature Index ranked the institute among the top 5 academic research-intensive institutes of India.