Indian institute of Technology Kanpur Archives

Subhankar Mukherjee

Dr. Subhankar Mukherjee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial & Management Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He joined IIT Kanpur in 2019, after completing his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata with specialization in economics. Dr. Mukherjee obtained his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and worked in the corporate sector for nearly 10 years before joining his Ph.D..

Dr. Mukherjee’s research interests are in the areas of economics of development and applied microeconomics. His research has been published in journals, such as The European Journal of Development Research, Applied Economics, Indian Growth and Development Review, and Economic & Political Weekly. He has also written articles for media outlets, such as The Hindu, Business Line and Ideas for India.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Mukherjee is analyzing the factors behind low utilization of crop insurance products among Indian farmers. Specifically, he is focusing on the role of awareness-building programs in improving the utilization rate of these products, and the differential impact of such programs on various caste-based groups and their take-up decisions.

Vaishali Thakkur

Ms. Vaishali Thakkur is a Ph.D. scholar at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), Uttar Pradesh. Her research focuses on modelling enzymatic reactions using density functional based on the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) technique. As a part of her doctoral thesis, she works with the QM/MM method, along with various enhanced sampling techniques, to study the underlying mechanism for antibiotic resistance. She is also interested in identifying and addressing the bottleneck in these calculations to make them more efficient. Apart from science, she enjoys spending her time learning new languages and playing with her color palette.

Prior to joining IITK as a research scholar, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s in Chemistry from Delhi University and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD), respectively. She has been a recipient of the merit cum means scholarship for her performance at IITD. She also has a year-long experience of working as an online educator and content reviewer at Chegg India Pvt. Ltd.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she will work with experts to understand and implement a new electrostatic embedding scheme in the existing QM/MM framework. The aim is to develop a model that is accurate and affordable at the same time. The introduction of such a method would be beneficial for people modelling reactions in complex biological systems, where the computation of these electrostatic interactions proves to be time consuming.

Anupam Banerjee

Prof. Anupam Banerjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur since November 2021. Prior to this, Anupam was a postdoctoral researcher at Niigata University, Japan. Anupam pursued his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ramananda Chakrabarti at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and was conferred the degree in 2018. He received an MSc in Geology from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2011 and a BSc in Geology from Presidency College Kolkata, University of Calcutta, in 2009.

Prof. Banerjee’s research interest lies in the applications of radiogenic, and non-traditional stable isotopes of magmatic rocks to understanding both Earth’s surface and deep interior processes. He has published several research articles in peer-reviewed international journals. Prof. Banerjee is a recipient of the Institute Medal from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore for the best PhD thesis. He is also a recipient of several grants for attending international conferences which include the SERB Travel support, Student Travel Grant from the American Geophysical Union, GARP Travel Grants from IISc .

Prof. Banerjee’s research during the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship is aimed at elucidating Earth’s deep carbon cycle using novel Mg and Zn stable isotopic compositions of carbon-rich magmatic rocks, called carbonatites. Important corollary questions that will be addressed in this project are: (i) How did Earth’s interior maintain the inventory of carbon with time? (ii) When did Earth’s carbon inventory establish and how did it change over geological time?

Sathesh Mariappan

Dr. Sathesh Mariappan is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He completed his Bachelors at Madras Institute of Technology, 2007 (University First Rank) and obtained his Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 2012, both in Aerospace Engineering. Before joining IIT Kanpur, he worked in the German Aerospace Center, Goettingen as a Humboldt Post Doctoral fellow. He is a recipient of Young Engineer Awards from the Indian National Academy of Engineering and Institution of Engineers. He is also recognized internationally through the Humboldt Fellowship and International Exchanges award (co-applicant) from The Royal Society – London. His research focuses on understanding and mitigating combustion-driven oscillations in gas turbine engines.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Dr. Mariappan will specialize in applying physics informed neural network (PINN): a machine learning method, to study combustion driven oscillations in combustors of gas turbine engines. PINN is an emerging tool, having the striking advantage to synergize experimental data and physics-based models. This synergy brings a new understanding of flame-flow interactions and helps develop more accurate hybrid models, which serve for instability prognosis and mitigation. This alternative (superior) hybrid framework will model combustor dynamics more accurately (than models derived purely from theory or experiments), even in practical systems, leading to efficient/robust control of oscillations.

Bokinala Moses Abraham

Dr. Bokinala Moses Abraham is National Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Prof. Jayant K. Singh at IIT-Kanpur, which focuses on fusing density functional theory simulations with modern machine learning approaches to rationalize and accelerate the chemical design and discovery of novel materials. Dr. Abraham obtained his first-class B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in physics from Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. Thereafter, he moved to the University of Hyderabad for a Ph.D. degree, where he pursued his own research ideas that enabled him to tackle multidisciplinary problems, such as those related to the study of materials at high-pressures, and understanding the physico-chemical properties of high-energy density materials.

Dr. Abraham has contributed to nearly 45 international publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has received several prestigious and competitive fundings for attending international conferences, which includes the RSC travel grant and the International Travel Support grant offered by Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India. He also received funding from high parallel-computing HPC-Europa3 mobility program (2022) for a research stay of 3 months at the University of Barcelona (UB), Spain with Prof. Dr. Francesc Illas’ group. Dr. Abraham’s work towards design and development of highly efficient catalysts for CO2 conversion and hydrogen evolution reaction are seminal contributions to the field of catalysis.

Dr. Abraham is designing and developing a library of unique and fascinating MXene-supported single atom catalysts by fusing modern machine-learning approaches with experimental techniques during the Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellowship for Postdoctoral Research. Dr. Abraham believes that the scientific knowledge generated from this project would be utilized as a reference for CO2 reduction into hydrocarbon fuels, thereby helping meet real-world energy demands in a sustainable manner.

Shivangi Mittal

Ms. Shivangi Mittal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. She works in the domain of rheology and focuses on developing a theoretical and mathematical approach for understanding nonlinear rheological data for complex fluids. She is a recipient of the Prime Minister Research Fellowship from the Government of India that funds her research at IIT Kanpur. She earned her bachelor’s in chemical engineering from Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals and presented at several conferences. Apart from research, she is passionate about teaching and is engaged in teaching B.Tech. students at government engineering colleges in Kanpur.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Mittal is developing the mathematical framework required to analyze thermodynamically out-of-equilibrium systems, or thixotropic materials, that have a time evolving structure and so, produce time-invariant outputs when subjected to oscillatory shear deformations. Her work presents new insights in understanding and defining thixotropy and viscoelasticity through rheological data.

Arka Banerjee

Arka Banerjee is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Studying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sample quality by computationally efficient estimation of the asymptotic covariance matrices in the multidimensional MCMC setup is the main focus of his doctoral thesis. He has published in reputed journals and has participated in and presented papers at national and international conferences.

Arka holds a bachelor’s and a master’s in statistics from the University of Calcutta. Before joining IIT Kanpur, he was a data analyst at Infosys Limited for a year where he worked on a financial modeling project that dealt with the prediction of default payments in a banking institution.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Minnesota, Arka is exploring the computationally efficient and optimized procedures in the estimation of asymptotic covariance matrices in MCMC for a better understanding of MCMC sample quality. During his grant period, he will be studying MCMC sample quality in a high dimensional setting. Arka enjoys travelling and cooking different culinary dishes.

Pratik Sen

Prof. Pratik Sen joined the Department of Chemistry at IIT Kanpur as an Assistant Professor in December 2008 and became a full professor in November 2018. He is currently the Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair at IIT Kanpur. Prof. Sen has received several awards and recognition for his research, which includes the Young Scientist Medal from Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in 2012; Young Faculty Research Fellowship from IIT Kanpur, 2015-2017; Member INYAS, 2016-2020; Young Faculty Research Fellowship of MeitY, India in 2018, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2021 and Bronze Medal of Chemical Research Society of India in 2021. Prof. Sen has published over 130 research articles in international journals of repute.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowships, his primary research interest is to understand clues about the existence of extremophiles (species that can survive in extreme conditions like cold, desiccation, osmotic stress, etc.). Studies show that extremophiles accumulate osmolytes in high concentrations that can form an alternate media, which probably maintains the enzymatic behaviour in harsh environments. He aims to study enzyme conformational dynamics at freezing conditions in the presence of alternate media using single-molecule spectroscopy. The proposed study can be instrumental in understanding the enzyme’s stability and activity in extreme conditions.