More than ten PhD scholars from the institution have been selected for prestigious awards and fellowships.
Creating a trail of achievements, a total of 13 PhD scholars and recent alumni of IITGN have won various prestigious awards and fellowships in the last two months. These students work in various areas of research for their doctoral studies.

Rajesh Hadiya, a PhD scholar from Biological Engineering, has been selected for the prestigious SERB-CII Prime Minister’s Fellowship for his doctoral research. It is a highly competitive scholarship of the Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). It is aimed at encouraging young, talented, enthusiastic and result-oriented scholars to take up industry-relevant research.

In another proud accomplishment, a total of six PhD scholars, namely, Prasanna Kulkarni and Yogesh Singh from Mechanical Engineering; Ashish Tiwari, Sachinkumar Suthar and Kailash Prasad from Electrical Engineering; and Rajes Ghosh from Physics, have bagged the prestigious Prime Minister Research Fellowship (May 2020 cycle). The fellowship attracts the best talent into research after a rigorous selection process, to realise the vision of development through innovation.

Taking this trend further up, two more PhD students, Chandan Kumar Jha from Electrical Engineering, and Nakshi Desai from Biological Engineering, have won the Student Startup Grant Challenge from the Centre for Innovation Incubation & Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad. Chandan has received the grant for his work on developing a virtual reality-based hand rehabilitation and assessment platform for stroke survivors. Whereas Nakshi has bagged the grant for her idea on disease diagnostics/testing, specifically for prostate cancer. Nakshi was also selected for a fully-funded internship at the University of Gothenburg for a period of 90 days.

Very recently, two more PhD students, Jaydeepsingh Chavda from Chemistry discipline, and Shanti Shwarup Mahto from Earth Sciences discipline have been selected for the DST- INSPIRE Fellowship. DST provides five years’ “Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research” (INSPIRE) Fellowship to first rank holders for pursuing PhD from reputed Indian Institutes/Universities in Basic and Applied Sciences.

Earlier, two recent alumnae of IITGN won prestigious awards in their respective fields. Dr Ankita Arora from Materials Science and Engineering received Prof Sabu Thomas Best Doctoral Thesis Award 2020 in the category of Polymer Sciences & Engineering. Ankita’s PhD work focused on designing new antibacterial peptides and polymers that target the outer layer of bacteria cells and can be potentially used to treat multi-drug resistant bacteria. Dr Deepa Dixit from Chemical Engineering has won SITARE – Gandhian Young Technological Innovation (GYTI) Award 2020 for the development of non-electric and affordable surface engineered particle-based point-of-use water disinfection.

Apart from these, Pradip Prajapati, a BTech student of Electrical Engineering at IITGN, has been selected as a Cargill Global Scholar for this year. He is one of the ten students selected from prestigious institutions across India. As part of the programme, he will receive a significant financial award and will get to attend leadership seminars organised by Cargill in India and abroad.

It is indeed a very proud moment for the Institute to see our students shine at national and international level. IITGN has always encouraged its students to aim higher and work hard to achieve their dreams. We provide them with all possible support of state-of-the-art research facilities, excellent faculty and global exposure that gives them the wings to fly. Krishna Kanti Dey

Associate Dean, Postgraduate Studies, IITGN

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