The Haryana government has sought help of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in the US to set up the Kalpana Chawla University of Health Sciences in Haryana's Karnal town.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, who is currently on a visit to the US, met officials of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on Wednesday and sought their help in setting up a world-class institution in Karnal.
"While inviting participation from Johns Hopkins in construction, maintenance, expert training and research activities of the university, the chief minister said the Haryana government desired to promote super-specialty services in the health sector so that people could get specialist healthcare services in the state," a state government spokesman said here.
During his visit, Khattar said the institute "would be developed as a Centre of Excellence to improve the health of the people through best clinical care, innovative research and by imparting education to the future leaders in medicine and allied fields".
Johns Hopkins University, the first research university in the US, has been ranked among top universities of the world. In the last 140 years, 36 Nobel Prize winners have been associated with Johns Hopkins.
Born in Karnal, Kalpana Chawla studied at the school in Karnal town, 130 km from Chandigarh, and became the first woman of Indian origin to go to space on NASA's space shuttle Columbia in 1997.
The space scientist, who had a degree in aeronautical engineering from Chandigarh's Punjab Engineering College, was chosen by NASA for her second space mission in January 2003. It was during the return journey, once again in Columbia, that the flight disintegrated while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003.
All seven astronauts, including Kalpana Chawla, perished in the disaster.
