Home › PhD entrance routes › ICMR JRF
What aspirants read for ICMR JRF, unit by unit, and what each title is for.
What qualifying gets you. Qualifying earns a Junior Research Fellowship of the Indian Council of Medical Research, awarded each year to roughly one hundred and twenty candidates in the biomedical and life sciences and thirty in the social sciences, with further positions available on ICMR-funded research projects. The fellowship runs for two years as JRF and may be upgraded after review to Senior Research Fellow for a further three years, to a maximum tenure of five years, which covers a full doctorate. The award is tenable at ICMR institutes and centres, medical colleges, universities and recognised research institutions across India, so the holder chooses the guide and the laboratory. Holding an ICMR-JRF also exempts a candidate from the written entrance test at several institute PhD programmes, including those at AIIMS, PGIMER and JIPMER.
The ICMR JRF paper is split between a compulsory aptitude section and a subject section, so candidates prepare on two tracks at once. The aptitude half is drilled from the same reasoning and quantitative books used across Indian competitive exams, usually a topic set a day; the life sciences half overlaps heavily with CSIR-NET, so most people reuse Lehninger and Lodish rather than buying separate texts. What distinguishes ICMR preparation is the public-health and health-research flavour - Park and Gordis answer the epidemiology, study-design and screening questions that CSIR never asks. The ICMR-specific guide is bought mainly to see how the paper frames questions.
Titles are tagged core reading — the ones scholars work right through — or reference, the ones they look things up in. Editions are given where the current edition is what you want to buy.
We print files you send us. We do not host, sell or supply book PDFs — send us a file you are entitled to print and we print, bind and deliver it.
| Unit | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Section A — Aptitude and general science | Scientific phenomena encountered in everyday life, broad general awareness of science across physics, chemistry and biology, and common statistics. This section is compulsory for both streams and is the block that separates candidates who have practised from those who have only revised their subject. |
| Section A — Common statistics | Measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability, normal distribution, sampling, correlation and regression, tests of significance and the reading of tables and graphs. Health-research candidates should treat this as core rather than peripheral, since the same material reappears in the fellowship's own coursework. |
| Life Sciences — Molecules and their interactions | Structure and function of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, nucleic acids and vitamins; stabilising interactions; principles of biophysical chemistry, bioenergetics and enzyme catalysis and regulation; and conformation of proteins and nucleic acids. |
| Life Sciences — Cellular organisation | Membrane structure and transport; the structure and function of intracellular organelles; organisation of genes and chromosomes; cell division and the cell cycle; and microbial physiology and growth. |
| Life Sciences — Fundamental processes | DNA replication, repair and recombination; RNA synthesis and processing; protein synthesis and post-translational processing; and the control of gene expression at transcription and translation level. |
| Life Sciences — Cell signalling and immunology | Host-parasite interaction; cell surface receptors, signal transduction pathways and second messengers; cell adhesion and the extracellular matrix; cancer biology, oncogenes, tumour suppressors and metastasis; and innate and adaptive immunity, antigen presentation, the major histocompatibility complex, T-cell and B-cell activation, complement and hypersensitivity. This is the block that carries the greatest weight for a biomedical fellowship. |
| Life Sciences — Developmental biology | Potency, commitment and differentiation; stem cells; gametogenesis and fertilisation; cleavage, gastrulation and germ-layer formation; organogenesis in animals and plants; and programmed cell death, ageing and senescence. |
| Life Sciences — System physiology | Animal physiology covering blood and circulation, the cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, excretory, digestive and endocrine systems, thermoregulation and reproduction; and plant physiology covering photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen metabolism, plant hormones, solute transport and stress physiology. |
| Life Sciences — Inheritance biology and human genetics | Mendelian principles and their extensions; gene mapping; extrachromosomal inheritance; microbial genetics; human genetics with pedigree analysis, karyotypes and genetic disorders; quantitative genetics; mutation; and structural and numerical chromosome alterations. |
| Life Sciences — Diversity, ecology, evolution and behaviour | Principles of taxonomy and classification of plants, animals and microorganisms; population and community ecology, ecosystems and applied ecology; the mechanisms of evolutionary change, population genetics and molecular evolution; and the neural and social basis of behaviour. |
| Life Sciences — Applied biology | Microbial fermentation and production of small and large molecules; immunological principles applied to vaccines and diagnostics; transgenic animals and plants; genomics applied to health and agriculture and gene therapy; bioremediation; and biosensors. |
| Life Sciences — Methods in biology | Molecular biology and recombinant DNA methods; histochemical and immunological techniques such as ELISA, western blot, immunoprecipitation and flow cytometry; biophysical methods and spectroscopy; radiolabelling; microscopy; electrophysiological methods; statistical methods; and methods in field biology. |
| Social Sciences — Behavioural and health social science | Psychology covering learning, motivation, personality, psychopathology and psychometrics; sociology and social anthropology covering social structure, stratification, family, culture and health-seeking behaviour; social work covering community organisation, case work and welfare administration; home science and nutrition; and health economics. |
| Social Sciences — Research methodology and statistics | Research design in the social sciences, sampling, questionnaire and scale construction, qualitative methods, ethics in human research, and applied statistics for health and social research including tests of significance, correlation, regression and multivariate methods. |
Send the PDF on WhatsApp — colour Rs 1/page, B&W 50p/page, binding Rs 40. Printed, bound and delivered anywhere in India.
Send your PDFThe 8 titles on this page, of which 6 are worked right through and the rest are kept as references. Most aspirants own three or four and borrow the rest.
One objective paper of two hours, taken in a single sitting, built from two blocks. Section A is compulsory and carries 50 aptitude questions on scientific phenomena in everyday life, general awareness of science, and common statistics, at one mark each. The candidate then chooses either Section B for Life Sciences or Section C for Social Sciences, each of which offers 100 questions from which any 75 are to be answered at one mark each. That makes 125 questions to be answered for 125 marks in total. The Life Sciences section follows the CSIR-UGC NET Life Science syllabus closely, which is why most candidates prepare for both papers together.
A postgraduate degree — M.Sc., MA or an equivalent such as M.Sc. Nursing, M.Pharm, M.V.Sc., or a four-year professional degree in the biomedical field — with at least 55% aggregate marks, relaxed to 50% for SC, ST and physically or visually handicapped candidates. The upper age limit is 28 years on the notified cut-off date, relaxed by five years for SC, ST, PwD and all women candidates and by three years for OBC candidates. Subjects accepted on the life-sciences side include life sciences, biotechnology, microbiology, biochemistry, physiology, veterinary science, pharmacy and bioinformatics; on the social-sciences side they include psychology, sociology, social work, anthropology, statistics, home science and health economics.
Once a year, with the notification issued ahead of a single national written examination.
We print from the PDF you send us. Send the file on WhatsApp with your page count and whether you want colour, black and white or mixed, and we print, bind and deliver anywhere in India. We do not supply copyrighted book files.