Professor
Department of Chemical Sciences
📍 5F7/AB1
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Research Area
Supramolecular Chemistry
Research Interests
Prof. S.K. Pal has significantly has explored different aspects of liquid crystals (LCs) and the applications best suited to each, and his research spans from design and synthetic strategies to optoelectronics, ferroelectrics and biosensors. The recent advancements of his group in the field of discotic liquid crystals (DLCs) have been prolific. The group aims at developing novel DLCs for applications as semiconductors and emitters in various optoelectronic devices. Apart from their self-assembly studies, the group also explores their charge transport and conductive behaviour in fabricated thin films. The group-members explore achiral unsymmetrical bent-shaped and hockey stick-shaped LCs with detailed mesomorphic studies, polar responses and electric-field-induced Fréedericksz transitions at different frequencies and temperatures. They also focus on achieving chiral dark conglomerate and blue phases over broad temperature ranges in an enantiotropic manner with persistent dielectric behaviour over the entire LC range. They have also adopted the orientational advantages of nematic LCs in practically significant biosensors, signifying the surface and interface studies of such sensing systems. They have extensively explored planar LC-aqueous interfaces as well as spherical LC droplet geometries, elaborating mechanistic aspects of aqueous-LC interfaces as responsive sites for biomolecular events by visualization through optic signals arising from lipid-membrane interactions.
Since 2024 : Member of the Editorial Board of Liquid Crystals
Since 2023 : Associate Editor: Bulletin of Materials Science https://www.ias.ac.in/Journals/Bulletin_of_Materials_Science/
Since 2022 : Professor, Department of Chemical Sciences, IISER Mohali
2016 - 2022 : Associate Professor, Department of Chemical Sciences, IISER Mohali
2010 - 2016 : Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Sciences, IISER Mohali
2008 - 2010 : Research Associate, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
2003 - 2008 : PhD, Raman Research Institute/Jawaharlal Nehru University
2001 - 2003 : MSc, University of Calcutta
1998 - 2001 : BSc, Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur/University of Calcutta, West Bengal
2022 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry; FRSC, UK
2022 ILCS Silver Medal from The Indian Liquid Crystal Society
2022 CRS Silver medal by Chirantan Rasayan Sanstha
2020 JACS Young Investigator
2020 Awarded CRSI Bronze Medal
2015 Awarded NASI Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award
2015 Awarded INSA Medal for Young Scientist
2014 DAE Young Achiever Award
2012 Awarded DAE Young Scientist Research Award
Shallu Dhingra, Santosh Prasad Gupta, Asmita Shah, Dharmendra Pratap Singh and Santanu Kumar Pal. Temperature-dependent hole mobility in pyrene-thiophene-based room-temperature discotic liquid crystals. Chemical Communications, 2024.
Tarang Gupta, Lisha Arora, Samrat Mukhopadhyay and Santanu Kumar Pal. Ultrasensitive Detection of Lipid-Induced Misfolding of the Prion Protein at the Aqueous–Liquid Crystal Interface. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 15:2117–2122, 2024.
Ritobrata De, Madhusudan Maity, Alvin Joseph, Santosh Prasad Gupta, Yogendra Nailwal, Manoj AG Namboothiry and Santanu Kumar Pal. High Electrical Conductivity and Hole Transport in an Insightfully Engineered Columnar Liquid Crystal for Solution-Processable Nanoelectronics. Small, page 2308983, 2024.
Supreet Kaur, Abinash Barthakur, Golam Mohiuddin, Santosh Prasad Gupta, Surajit Dhara and Santanu Kumar Pal. Observation of “de Vries-like” properties in bent-core molecules. Chemical Science 13(8):2249–2257, 2022.
Ipsita Pani, Fidha Nazreen KM, Monika Sharma and Santanu Kumar Pal. Probing Nanoscale Lipid–Protein Interactions at the Interface of Liquid Crystal Droplets. Nano Letters 21(11):4546–4553, 2021.
Indu Bala, Joydip De, Santosh Prasad Gupta, Harpreet Singh, Upendra Kumar Pandey and Santanu Kumar Pal. High hole mobility in room temperature discotic liquid crystalline tetrathienoanthracenes. Chemical communications 56(42):5629–5632, 2020.
Joydip De, Abdul Haseeb MM, Rohit Ashok Kumar Yadav, Santosh Prasad Gupta, Indu Bala, Prateek Chawla, Kiran Kishore Kesavan, Jwo-Huei Jou and Santanu Kumar Pal. AIE-active mechanoluminescent discotic liquid crystals for applications in OLEDs and bio-imaging. Chemical Communications 56(91):14279–14282, 2020.
Joydip De, Indu Bala, Santosh Prasad Gupta, Upendra Kumar Pandey and Santanu Kumar Pal. High hole mobility and efficient Ambipolar charge transport in heterocoronene-based ordered columnar Discotics. Journal of the American Chemical Society 141(47):18799–18805, 2019.
Vidhika Punjani, Golam Mohiuddin, Supreet Kaur, Raj Kumar Khan, Sharmistha Ghosh and Santanu Kumar Pal. Observation of polar order and thermochromic behaviour in a chiral bent-core system exhibiting exotic mesophases due to superstructural frustration. Chemical communications 54(28):3452–3455, 2018.
Venugopala R Battula, Harpreet Singh, Sunil Kumar, Indu Bala, Santanu Kumar Pal and Kamalakannan Kailasam. Natural sunlight driven oxidative homocoupling of amines by a truxene-based conjugated microporous polymer. Acs Catalysis 8(8):6751–6759, 2018.