The Department of Chemical Engineering (A1) has no shortage of research initiatives at present. Prof. HK Mohanta (Head of Department) and Prof. Smita Raghuvanshi (Convener of the Departmental Research Committee) took time off their busy schedules to talk to the English Press Club about the research that is going on in the department.

All thirteen faculty members of the department are currently involved in research. Their areas of interest include environmental engineering, reaction mechanics, foam modelling and applications, energy engineering, and process control.  In the recent past, there have been between fifteen and eighteen publications each year in journals of note, including the SEI (Structural Engineering International), and the Scopus database. Teaching assistants and research scholars are also provided to all faculty to help facilitate research. Sophisticated equipment like the FTIR (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy) spectrometer, the XRD (X-Ray Diffractometer), and GC-MS (Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry) instruments have been procured to further sample analysis.

Student research may occur at three levels – PhD, Masters, and Bachelors.

Students may apply for a PhD via the ARD (Academic Research Division) and are shortlisted based on their grades in their Masters. The Departmental Research Committee then recommends a notional thesis supervisor based on department need and student area of interest. Students must submit their thesis within ten semesters, not including summer-terms. B.E. students are usually not given the option to pursue a PhD due to a lack of work experience. There are presently ten PhD scholars in the department.

Masters students may choose to undergo a one-year dissertation (or thesis). Faculty members pitch their research fields and topics through short presentations and one-to-one interactions, following which the students can opt to work in a certain field or under a certain professor. Clashes in preferences are resolved based on their CGPAs. At present, there are 24 M.E. students from the department working on campus.

B.E. students may opt for a thesis in their fourth year. Faculty members pitch their research topics via email and students may decide to pursue a certain topic for a semester. Students may also apply for an off-campus thesis (usually abroad), in which case a faculty member from the department is assigned as a co-supervisor. All research is shared between the two institutes.

Mid/end-semester presentations have also been introduced where all faculty members and students involved in research present and discuss their findings while other members comment and provide suggestions to help improve upon certain initiatives.

The department also plans to increase the number of research proposals submitted to agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Biotechnology, and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy among others in an effort to obtain more funding and research grants. Faculty are also reaching out to other institutes, both native and foreign, for collaborative projects.

When asked, Prof. Raghuvanshi claimed that studying and ideation are the cornerstones of research. She also asserted that it is important to keep track of new developments in the various scientific fields, and a little awareness would go a long way.