Gandhi College was founded by Dr. Jagadish Shukla, Professor and chairman of Climate Dynamics in the School of Computational Sciences (SCS), George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax Virginia, USA, and President of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), Calverton, Maryland, USA.
J. Shukla was born in 1944 in village Mirdha in the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, India. This village had no electricity, no roads or transportation, and no primary school. Most of his primary education was received under a large banyan tree until his father established a primary school in the village. He passed high school from S.R.S. High School, Sheopur, in 1958 with distinction in Mathematics and Sanskrit. He was unable to study science in high school because none of the schools near his village included science education. His father, the late Shri Chandra Shekhar Shukla who was headmaster of a middle school nearby in village Shukhpura, insisted that he begin to study science from eleventh grade. After passing the twelfth grade from the S.C. College, Ballia, he went to Banaras Hindu University (BHU) where in 1962, he passed B.Sc. (honors) with Physics, Mathematics, and Geology, and in 1964 M.Sc. in Geophysics. He received Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Geophysics from BHU(1971) and Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) in Meteorology from MIT (1976). He is author/co-author of about 200 scientific papers and reports. He has been thesis advisor for 15 Ph.D. students at MIT, University of Maryland and GMU. He is Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, Indian Meteorological Society, and Associate Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). He has received the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal of NASA, Walker Gold Medal of the Indian Meteorological Society, and the Rossby Medal of the American Meteorological Society. He is member/chairman of numerous national and international committees.
J. Shukla has three brothers (Mahendra, Kanhaiya and Shriram Shukla), and two sisters (Bimla Pandey and Subhadra Upadhyay). It was one of the last wishes of his mother, the late Shrimati Sita Devi, who could barely read and write her name, that a college for the education of rural girls be established in the village.
