Before joining InterCat, I did projects involving carbon capture and rare earth oxide catalysis for energy conversion and storage at the I2CNER facility in Japan. There I worked with Prof. Aleksandar Staykov at Kyushu University and finished my master's which was funded by the Japan Government (MEXT) scholarship program. I got my undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India.
I started in Nov of 2023 as a PhD student at InterCat. My work involves studying various silicate surfaces present in interstellar medium for ice formation using theoretical methods such as DFT and molecular dynamics. I will use machine learning potentials for faster screening of different structures, working on global optimization, search algorithm problems, and other computational approaches to understand the surface morphology and ice nucleation on the silicate dust grains and later predicting the spectra of these structures to assist observations from JWST. I am supervised by Prof. Mie Andersen and Prof. Bjørk Hammer.
