The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay is organizing an Institute lecture on Thursday, January 12, 2023.

The details of the lecture are given below:

Title: 'Materials Design through NanoEngineering'

Speaker: Prof. P. M. Ajayan, Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering, Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

About the speaker: Prof. P. M. Ajayan is an world-renowned pioneer in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. His research interest extends from synthesis and structure-property relations of nanostructures and nanocomposites, materials science and applications of nanomaterials, energy storage to phase stability in nanoscale systems. He is one of the pioneers in the field of carbon nanotubes and was involved in the early work on developing a rational synthesis of carbon nanotubes along with the NEC group.

He has been recognized with several awards including the Spiers Memorial Award by the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), Senior Humboldt Prize, MRS medal, Scientific American 50 recognition, RPI senior research award, the Burton award from the microscopic society of America and the Hadfield medal for the outstanding student metallurgist in India. He has been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), AAAS, foreign fellow of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Sciences (India), and has been elected honorary member of Materials Research Society of India and the Indian Institute of Metals. He also received the distinguished alumnus award from the department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University and from Banaras Hindu University. He has held distinguished guest Professorships in the School of Materials Sciences at University of Louis Pasteaur at Strasbourg and ISIS (France), Tsinghua University (China), Shandong University (China) and Shinshu University (Japan), Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (India), Indian Institute of Technology Chennai (India), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He received the Docteur Honoris Causa UniversitÃ(c) Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in 2014. He is on the advisory editorial board of several materials science and nanotechnology journals and on the boards of several nanotech companies. He has been part of two Guinness Book of World records, one for the creation of the smallest brush and the other for creating the darkest material.

Abstract: The last two decades in engineering sciences have been dominated by spectacular discoveries in nanotechnology. This talk will focus on some of these developments and in particular the challenges and opportunities in designing and synthesizing functional nanoengineered materials. The talk will discuss several classes of materials, for example carbon based nanostructures and two- dimensional structures, and the impact of bottom-up engineering on the design of material systems relevant for many areas of applications including energy, structural, chemical and electronics. Several aspects that include synthesis, processing and manufacturing of materials will be broadly discussed to convey the goals of achieving functional nanoengineered materials.