Category Chemistry

What do we know about Dr. Sachchida Nand Tripathi?

You might have read in the papers some time back that the Taj Mahal was losing its white marble sheen and turning yellowish due to pollution. Dr. Sachchida Nand Tripathi, who holds the Arjun Dev Joneja Faculty Chair of Civil Engineering at IIT-Kanpur, was in the news for this study. His study helped bring about policy changes in Agra city.

This study specified that black carbon and brown carbon from the burning of trash and fuels was the main cause for discolouration. Using a novel method, the team discovered how the specks of dust on the surface reflect light and affect the colour. This study is crucial to develop strategies that address yellowing of the Taj Mahal and improves air quality.

His work in the field of Atmospheric Sciences has addressed the issues of air pollution and climate change. He has also novel approaches for low-cost sensor-based network technology which can monitor air quality in cities and Real Time Source Apportionment (RTSA). RTSA involves finding out the sources of pollution and how much they affect the environment.

Dr. Tripathi is the Coordinator of the National Knowledge Network devised under the National Clean Air Program, and is a member of its Steering Committee and Monitoring Committee. Further, he is a member of the Executive Council, Climate Change Program, Department of Science and Technology.

The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award and the J C Bose National Fellowship are both feathers in his cap. He is an elected Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) and National Academy of Sciences of India (NASI). He also worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre as a senior fellow.

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What do we know about Kanishka Biswas?

Have you ever noticed that all electric appliances generate heat energy? Do we need to waste electrical energy as heat? Kanishka Biswas, who is an associate professor in the New Chemistry Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, and his team have come up with a novel compound called silver copper telluride(Ag Cu te) which converts waste heat into electricity. Usually, 65 per cent of electrical energy is wasted as heat energy. Silver copper telluride can be used in automobile industry and power plants where much of the energy is wasted as heat.

Kanishka Biswas is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), U.K. He has bagged many prestigious awards and prominent among them is the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, which he won for Chemical Sciences in 2021.

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What are the contributions of Prof. Ashoke Sen?

We meet another theoretical physicist who works on string theory. Prof. Ashoke Sen is a distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. He is also interested in black hole entropy. We have already seen black holes. Now, entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. Dr. Sen applied string theory to black hole entropy. He studied at IIT-Kanpur and got a doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, U.S.A.

He has authored and co-authored many important papers on string field theory. Prof. Sen holds the position of Honorary Fellow in the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar. He is also a Morning- star visiting professor at MIT and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

Prof. Sen was one of the nine winners of the first Fundamental Physics prize started by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner – each of the winners getting $ 3 million. This is twice the amount of the Nobel prize. He was nominated as a Fellow of the Royal Society, won the Padma Shri and was a recipient of the Bhatnagar Award in 1994.

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Why is Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju well known in his field?

Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju is a professor of Chemistry at the University of Hyderabad. He is regarded as one of the founders of Crystal Engineering.

Have you heard of Crystal Engineering? It is designing molecular solids with specific properties. This is done by making use of the interactions between molecules.

Crystal Engineering has developed greatly and Desiraju played a crucial role in this. Now 200 independent research groups in Crystal Engineering exist worldwide.

He has also researched into the non-conventional hydrogen bond, also known as the weak hydrogen bond. These bonds have distinct roles and guide molecular associations. Earlier they were dismissed to be of no significance. Now these bonds are used to understand biomolecules and to create drugs.

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Why is Charusita Chakravarty a remarkable woman?

Charusita Chakravarty was an Indian academic and scientist. She was a professor of chemistry at IIT – Delhi. She was also an Associate Member of the Centre for Computational Material Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru.

When she started her career, women were not taken very seriously in the field of science. Dr Charusita Chakravarty was determined to excel in her field. She raised her voice against the gender bias in the STEM fields. (STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine). She encouraged other women also to enter these fields.

She was born in Massachusetts in the US as her parents were leading economists there. However, she was raised in Delhi. Being a single child and growing up in a liberal environment gave her the courage to defy boundaries from an early age. She was also keen on poetry and music.

She topped the Delhi Higher Secondary Board and also Delhi University in her B. Sc Chemistry from St. Stephens College. She did a Natural Science Tripos from Cambridge and then her PhD, on quantum scattering and spectroscopy. She did her post-doctoral studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Her fields of interest also included theoretical chemistry and chemical physics, the structure and dynamics of liquids, water and hydration, nucleation and self-assembly. Her articles have come in national and international journals.

She received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology and also the B.M. Birla Science Award. Sadly, on 29 March 2016, Chakravarty passed away after a long and arduous battle with breast cancer.

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What do we know about Abhay Ashtekar?

Dr. Abhay Ashtekar is famous world-wide for trying to connect Einstein’s Theory of Relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics. These two theories are conflicting by nature and scientists are divided between the two. Dr. Ashteker is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity, and its sub-field, loop quantum cosmology.

Abhay Ashtekar’s childhood was spent in many Indian metros, including Mumbai. He went to the University of Texas at Austin for his graduation in gravitation. His PhD was at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Geroch. He held many positions at Oxford, Paris and Syracuse before settling at Pennsylvania.

In 1992, Penn State University created the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry specifically for him. Ashtekar and his colleagues calculated the entropy for a black hole. This matched a prediction made by Hawking. His approach to quantum gravity has been described as “The most important of all the attempts at ‘quantizing’ general relativity.”

Ashtekar was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science and one of only 40 Honorary Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences drawn from the international community. He won the Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society and Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has held the Krammers Visiting Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and the Sir C. V. Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Currently he is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University.

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