Professor Samar Kumar Das, faculty at the School of Chemistry, University of Hyderabad (UoH) was awarded the prestigious JC Bose fellowship. 

This fellowship has been awarded for his research contribution in the area of achieving sustainable/renewable energy in the context of today’s needs of society, because fossil fuels (non-renewable energy sources) are not only being depleted day by day from our planet but also its use affects our environment drastically by releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

Prof Samar Das has been exploring functional inorganic materials that are vital to addressing the issues of sustainable/renewable energy and a clean environment. In order to contribute to these contemporary issues, he works on water splitting project to develop inexpensive metal oxide based materials that not only work as catalysts for water splitting but also exhibit proton conductivity and oxygen reduction for the fuel cells (sustainable energy issue); his group developed materials that can sense toxic substances, for example, azide anion and methanol (healthcare issue) and can be used to capture aerial CO2 (environment issue). 

During the next five years (JC Bose Fellowship duration), Prof Samar Das' group would like to work on photo and electro-catalytic water splitting, electrocatalysis in general and developing metal-oxide-based (inexpensive) proton exchange membranes for fuel cells to achieve carbon-free sustainable energy.