Ashoka University

Professor Sourav Pal joined Ashoka University as Professor of Chemistry on October 12, 2022. Previously, he served as Visiting Professor of Ashoka and was the Director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata for five years, from Oct 12, 2017, to Oct 11, 2022. He was also the Professor of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay from June 1, 2015, to May 31, 2020. Prior to joining IIT Bombay, he was the Director of CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune, and worked at NCL Pune for almost 33 years. He was instrumental in setting up the Electronic Structure Theory Group at NCL. He is a distinguished theoretical chemist and has contributed to methodological and conceptual developments in many-body electronic structure theory, to the area of density-based chemical reactivity, as well as to catalytic and hydrogen storage materials using computational material science.

With a 5-year integrated Master’s degree in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 1977, and a Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University, he joined NCL in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA (1986-87) and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (1987). He was visiting a professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, the University of Torun, Poland, and the Institute for Molecular Sciences, Okazaki, Japan. He also holds Adjunct Professorships at IISER Pune and IIT Goa. He is also a distinguished Visiting Professor at IIT Kharagpur. He served as the President of the Chemical Research Society of India for three years, starting on April 1, 2014. He is a member of the Executive Council of the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies and is the Chairman of the Chemical Division Council of the Bureau of Indian Standards. Presently, he is on the founding Executive Board of the Commonwealth Chemistry, which is a federation of chemical sciences of Commonwealth nations. In addition, he has served on several important scientific committees in the country and abroad. He was a member of the Council of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi.

He has received several awards and honours in recognition of his contributions to science, including the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Chemical Sciences in 2000 and the SASTRA-CNR Rao Award in Chemistry & Materials Science in 2014. He is a Fellow of The Indian National Science Academy (2003), the Indian Academy of Sciences (1996) and National Academy of Sciences (1998), and the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences (1994). He has been a J C Bose National Fellow of the Department of Science and Technology since 2008. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, U.K. (2011).

He has published about 300 papers in International peer-reviewed journals and contributed chapters to several books. He has guided about 45 PhD theses and is the author of a book titled “Mathematics in Chemistry”. He has been invited to deliver plenary/keynote/highlighted lectures in several institutions and international conferences of repute over the years.