Prof. Sarang Medhekar. Dept. of Physics took over the charge of Vice Chancellor of Central University of Jharkhand with effective from 06.02.2026 till the new Vice-Chancellor assumes the office. He is an active researcher in the area of applied optics since his doctoral work. He was awarded OPTEL fellowship for the doctoral research. He is the recipient of Young Scientist Award by MPCOST Govt. of MP in 1995 for his work on new kind of photonic device “optical power filter” proposed by him which was later published in world’s one of the most recognized journals of Optical Society of America “Optics Letters” Prof. Medhekar is working in Central University of Jharkhand since Oct 2012. He has successfully completed many governments funded projects. Prof. Medhekar has60 international journal publications with many papers in top journals like Applied Physics Letters, Optics Letters, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, Optics & Laser Technology, Optik etc. He is the inventor of 05 patents also. He was invited twice at Hartford University, USA for experimentationon his proposal “all-optical passive transistor”. Prof Medhekar visited Penn state university for the Academic Leadership programme of MHRD, Govt of India. He has guided seven doctoral theses. His current areas of research interest are photonic devices, all-optical switching, optical computing, Photonic Crystals and soliton propagation.