Thursday, March 17, 2022
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
On Zoom
Building clean water technologies from a chemistry laboratory
By T. Pradeep, Professor, Department of Chemistry, IIT Madras
Abstract
In this talk, I will present my efforts in building clean water technologies from basic science to commercial companies. Today, these technologies are delivering arsenic and iron free water to over 1.2 million people every day. The objective is to communicate to the student community that clean water research is rewarding both scientifically and commercially.
About the Speaker
Thalappil Pradeep (email:pradeep@iitm.ac.in) is an Institute Professor at IITM. He is the Deepak Parekh Institute Chair Professor and is also a Professor of Chemistry. He studied at the University of Calicut, Indian Institute of Science, UC Berkeley and Purdue. His research interests are in molecular and nanoscale materials and he develops instrumentation for such studies. He is an author of over 500 scientific papers in journals and is an inventor of 125 patents or patent applications.
In addition to the work on advanced materials, he is involved in the development of affordable technologies for drinking water purification and some of them have been commercialized. His pesticide removal technology is estimated to have reached about 10 million people. Along with his associates, he has incubated seven companies and three of them have production units. His arsenic removal technology, approved for national implementation, is delivering arsenic free water to about 1.2 million people every day.
He is a recipient of several awards including the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Prize (2008), The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) prize in Chemistry (2018), Padma Shri (2020) and Nikkei Asia Prize (2020). He is a Fellow of all the science and engineering academies of India, Royal Society of Chemistry, TWAS and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has written several books and is part of over ten scientific journals and is an associate editor of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. He has authored popular science books in Malayalam and is a recipient of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for knowledge literature.
He has received the Lifetime Achievement Research Award of IIT Madras and Distinguished Alumnus Award of IISc. As part of his philanthropic activities, he supports a school in his village where 500 students are on rolls.
Visit https://pradeepresearch.org for more information.
