Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education Science week valedictory

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Clinicians in medical colleges have tremendous scope for innovative research leading to valuable commercial patents said Dr. Manoj Murhekar, Director, National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai while speaking after distributing prizes and certificates to award winning research presentations by students, researchers and faculty at Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education’s science week valedictory here today. There is good scope for disease based clinical research like in the case of malaria and tuberculosis.

Stressing that medical colleges have ample clinical material, academic and research environment, field practice through community medicine and institutional credibility Dr.Manoj Murhekar said that there is scope for multidisciplinary and multi centric research and networking.  He however lamented that in a study undertaken among the then 579 medical colleges in India between 2005 and 2014, 332 medical colleges had not even one research publication and only about 25 percent of the medical colleges had over 100 research publications in a year. While the covid19 pandemic offered excellent opportunity for research and over 45000 research papers were published worldwide India’s contribution was only 5 percent, much worse their citations were less than one percent, he added.

Dr. Manoj Murhekar said ICMR is looking for applications for more centres for advanced research in different faculties of medical colleges.

The Chancellor Mr.V.R.Venkataachalam released the first issue of Sri Ramachandra Journal of Health Sciences and announced a grant of five lakh rupees for starting a students’ research club.

Speaking on the occasion Dr.P.V.Vijayaraghavan, Vice Chancellor said that SRIHER has now 32 extra mural research grants and clinicians have been brought into active research and are looking for innovation.

Dr.Kalpana Balakrishnan, Dean Research said the university which has a centre for advanced research in environmental health funded by ICMR will seek five more such centres in various medical faculties, this year.