In July 2018, joined the vibrant atmosphere of academics in a beautifully constructed campus of IIT Jodhpur sprawling over more than 800 acres of land. Prior to joining IIT Jodhpur, served in Defence Research & Development Organization, India’s premier R&D organization, for a period of more than 34 years. My journey of more than three decades in DRDO has been highly rewarding wherein I could gain rich experience of translational R&D and the processes to overcome the associated technological challenges.

The key objective my research at IIT Jodhpur is to integrate the academic excellence of IIT Jodhpur with my learnings from R&D and work towards creating an ecosystem of Innovative R&D to develop materials, technologies and devices for strategic applications. The methodology involves entire sequence of processes starting from molecular design of new materials, development of novel synthetic routes, characterization for micro- and macroscopic properties, converting into a product, characterization and testing of the product and finally application of the product at system level together with its performance evaluation.

Further, the key element of our fundamental research is to develop new, novel, ecofriendly, energy efficient, simple and scalable methods for synthesis of a range of advanced functional materials including conducting polymers, ferrites, luminescent materials, photochromic materials, nanomaterials, multifunctional materials, core-shell nanomaterials, etc.

Our research work in the areas of ZnS, ZnO, magnetic nanomaterials and other functional materials has attracted large numbers of citations. The R&D efforts have also resulted into a number of patents and transfer of technologies.