Award for 3 from National Chemical Laboratory

Three scientists,Dr Amol Arvindrao Kulkarni,Dr Dattatraya H Dethe and Dr Rahul Banerjee were on Thursday selected for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Young Scientist Award 2011. While Kulkarni has been selected for the ‘CSIR Young Scientist Award’ for the year 2011 in engineering sciences,Dr Dethe and Dr Banerjee have been selected for the same in the chemical sciences category.

Dr Kulkarni,who holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology,Mumbai (formerly UDCT) and Postdoc from the Max Planck Institute,Magdeburg (Germany),works with the Chemical Engineering and Process Development Division of National Chemical Laboratory (NCL). Dr Dethe,who is with the Organic Chemistry Division of NCL,works in the area of total syntheses of bioactive natural products. After joining NCL in July 2009,he started a major research program on the total synthesis of bioactive natural products and their simplified analogues for Structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies and new drug discovery program.

Dr Banerjee,who works with the physical and materials chemistry division of NCL,specialises in design and synthesis of porous metal organic frameworks (MOFs) for reversible hydrogen storage and carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration applications. His research group has investigated more than 50 F -MOFs with flexible fluorinated dicarboxylate building blocks.

The award,which carries a cash prize and a citation,will be presented to the scientists on September 26,the CSIR foundation day at CSIR,New Delhi.