Four persons from Bengaluru, including three from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), have won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (SSBP) for Science and Technology, 2022.
Akkattu T. Biju, associate professor, Department of Organic Chemistry, received the prize in chemical sciences for his work on transition-metal-free carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bond-forming reactions using aryne chemistry and carbene-based organocatalysis.
His research group has utilised aryne chemistry for the synthesis of biologically important 1,2-disubstituted arenes, and employed nucleophilic heterocyclic carbene-based catalytic techniques for the construction of various heterocyclic compounds as a single enantiomer.
The unconventional carbon-carbon bond-forming reactions using carbene catalysis have opened up new avenues for the synthesis of valuable heterocyclic compounds and drug-like molecules.
Apoorva Khare, associate professor, Department of Mathematics received the award for Mathematical Sciences. According to IISc, he works in several subfields of mathematics and in matrix analysis, he has obtained new links between analysis, and symmetric functions in algebraic combinatorics, extending the results of Loewner, Cauchy, and Frobenius.
He has also shown novel characterisations of (weak) majorization via Schur polynomials, and improved fundamental results of Schoenberg and Rudin on entry-wise preservers of positive semidefinite matrices. These have led to novel analysis applications of Schur polynomials (characters of irreducible representations). In representation theory, he has found weight formulas for all highest weight modules over Kac-Moody Lie algebras, and Weyl character formulas for universal objects in Category O.
Anindya Das, associate professor, Department of Physics, received the award in Physical Sciences. His group specialises in experimental condensed matter physics, focusing on transport phenomena in emerging quantum nano-devices.
Their key achievements include uncovering new collective phases and quantum phenomena in two dimensions, employing cutting-edge techniques such as thermal transport in van der Waals hetero-structures involving graphene and layered materials. These findings have profound implications across condensed matter physics and hold potential for applications in quantum technology.
Neeraj Kayal from the Department of Mathematics and Computing Microsoft Research Lab India, Bengaluru, also received the award for Mathematical Science.
