He will succeed Dr Satish Shetye who retires in October 2016. The appointment was made by the Chancellor and Goa Governor Dr Mridula Sinha. Sahni is not new to Goa. He was a reader in the Centre for Latin American Studies at GU over two decades ago.
Sahni was among nine shortlisted candidates that the ‘search committee’ headed by noted scientist Dr Raghunath Mashelkar had interviewed. Among them was P B Nadda, professor at Himachal Pradesh University and brother of Union minister of Health & Family Welfare Jagat Nadda.
Before joining JNU in 1995, Sahni was Junior Research Fellow in Politics and Junior Dean at Lincoln College, Oxford; Resident Fellow of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, New Delhi besides a Reader in Latin American Politics at GU. He has been visiting professor/fellow at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM; Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City; National Defense University, Washington, DC (2003, under the Fulbright Military Academies Initiative) and the Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy, The Australian National University, Canberra (2008). From December 2008 to January 2012, he served as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jammu.
