Pune: NCL’s Dr Amol Kulkarni Selected For Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences and AV Rama Rao Chair Professor
Pune, September 26, 2020: Dr Amol A. Kulkarni, Senior Principal Scientist CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory (CSIR-NCL), Pune has been selected for the prestigious S S Bhatnagar (SSB) Prize awarded by CSIR in the Engineering Sciences category for the year 2020.
Dr Amol Kulkarni has also been selected as Dr AV Rama Rao Chair Professor, established this year by M/s Avra Laboratories Pvt. Ltd. The tenure of this appointment is for three years. He will be allocated up to Rs 10 lakh per year to undertake a translational project along with monthly remuneration.
Dr Amol A Kulkarni is with the Chemical Engineering & Process Development Division of CSIR-NCL Since 2005. He is a chemical engineer by training (B. Chem. Eng. 1998, and PhD in chemical engineering 2003 from the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), Mumbai. He did his post-doctorate at the Max Planck Institute-Magdeburg (Germany) as a Humboldt Fellow (2004) and was an IUSSTF Research Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the USA in 2010.
Dr Amol works in the area of design and development of continuous flow reactors and exploring their applications for continuous syntheses of pharmaceutical intermediates, dyes, perfumery chemicals and nanomaterials. He has established the first of its kind microreactor laboratory in India. He also works on experimental and numerical analysis of multiphase fluid dynamics in presence of diffusion and reaction.
Dr Amol has used fundamental understanding of transport phenomena and reaction engineering for designing various flow reactors. He has successfully transformed complex batch processes into continuous processes with enhanced process efficiency by over two orders of magnitudes. He has successfully demonstrated the usefulness of his flow reactors for the variety of chemical intermediates that are used in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical, perfumery and dyestuff industry. He has also developed the first-ever scalable continuous process for silver nanowires. He collaborates extensively with scientists from various disciplines and strongly believes in working with people of various expertise.
Dr Amol is the recipient of VASVIK Award for Excellence in Industrial Research (2016) and Swarnajayanti Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology (2015). He has received young scientist awards from Indian National Science Academy INSA (2009), Indian National Academy of Engineering INAE (2009), CSIR (2011), Indian Academy of Sciences (2011) and Organization of Pharmaceutical Producers of India (2015).
Dr Amol has published about 100 research papers in international peer-reviewed journals, supervised 8 PhD students (7 ongoings), filed over 35 patents and also designed several flow reactors that are licensed to Indian industries. He is on the editorial boards of international peer-reviewed journals like Journal of Flow Chemistry (Springer), Advanced Powder Technology (Elsevier), Transactions of INAE (Springer) and on the Advisory Board of Reaction Chemistry and Engineering (RSC UK).
The SSB Prize, instituted in the honour of the founder Director of CSIR, is the highest Indian award in Science and is known as “Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (SSB) Prize for Science Technology”. The award carries a citation, a plaque and a cash prize of Rs 5 lakhs. The awards were announced by CSIR on its 79th Foundation Day.
