Dr. R.A. Mashelkar was till recently the Director General of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the largest chain of publicly funded industrial research and development institutions in the world, with thirty-eight laboratories and about 22,000 employees.

Dr. Mashelkar is only the third Indian engineer to have been elected as Fellow of Royal Society (FRS), London in the twentieth century. He was elected Foreign Fellow of US National Academy of Engineering (2003), Foreign Fellow of US National Academy of Science and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, U.K. (1996). Fifteen universities have honoured him with honorary doctorates, including Universities of London, Pretoria, Wisconsin and Delhi. He was till recently the President of the Indian. National Science Academy.

When Dr. Mashelkar took over as the Director General of CSIR, he enunciated "CSIR 2001: Vision & Strategy". This was a bold attempt to draw out a corporate like R&D and business plan for a publicly funded R&D institution. This initiative has transformed CSIR into a user focused, performance driven and accountable organization. This process of transformation has been recently heralded as one of the ten most significant achievements of Indian Science and Technology in the twentieth Century.

Dr. Mashelkar has been propagating a culture of innovation and balanced intellectual property rights regime for over a decade. He spearheaded the successful challenge to the US patent on the use of turmeric for wound healing and also the patent on Basmati rice. These landmark cases have set new paradigms in the protection of India's traditional knowledge base. In turn, at an international level, this has led to the initiation of the change of the International Patent Clarification System to give traditional knowledge its rightful place. As Chairman of the Standing Committee on Information Technology of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and as member of the International Intellectual Property Rights Commission, he brought many new perspectives on the issue of IPR and developing world concerns.