Dr. Sai Gautam Gopalakrishnan was awarded the Prof. Priti Shankar Teaching Award for Assistant Professors by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He was conferred the award at the IISc Court meeting on 15^th March 2024, which was presided over by the President of the IISc Court, Mr. N. Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons.

Ankur, Ankit, Hasna, Debolina, and Aqshat participated in the 37^th Annual Students Symposium organized by the Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, on 29^th February and 1^st March, 2024. Ankur and Ankit spoke about their recent research while Debolina, Hasna, and Aqshat presented posters on their work. Do join in if around.

Congratulations to Debolina on winning the ‘Best poster’ award at the symposium!

Several group members participated in the Annual Sports Meet of the Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science. The group would like to congratulate:

• Ankur on winning the Gold in Chess
• Tejus on winning the Gold in Football
• Dereje on winning the Silver in Football
• Santosh on winning the Silver in Badminton

Dr. Sai Gautam Gopalakrishnan will deliver a physical, invited talk at the International Advanced Research Centre for powder metallurgy and new materials (ARCI), Hyderabad on 27^th February, 2024, from 10.30-11.30am. Sai Gautam will be presenting some of the latest battery research done by the group.

Do join the talk if you will be around in the vicinity.

Reshma, Dereje, Debolina, Aqshat, and Pawan will be presenting their recent research work at the 18^th Asian Conference on Solid State Ionics (ACSSI), at the Meenakshi College for Women, Chennai, India. The conference is organized by the Asian Society for Solid State Ionics. While Reshma and Pawan give talks, Debolina, Dereje, and Aqshat present posters at the conference. More details available at the conference website here. Do tune in if around.

Congrats to Reshma and Dereje on winning the ‘Best Oral’ and ‘Best Poster’ presentation awards, respectively, at the ACSSI 2024 conference. Dereje’s poster can be found here.

Dr. Sai Gautam Gopalakrishnan will deliver a physical, invited talk as part of the one day workshop on “Current challenges in Na-ion and solid-state Batteries”, to be held at the Research Institute for Sustainable Energy (RISE), which is a part of The Chatterjee Group (TCG)-Centres for Research and Education in Science and Technology (CREST), Kolkata, India. Sai Gautam will be giving an overview of using computational and informatics tools for materials design in energy storage. The chief guest of the workshop is Prof. Shirley Meng from University of Chicago. If you are in the TCG-CREST campus, do drop by.

January 2024 had two new Masters student entrants to the SAI MATerials group, including Debsundar Dey (left in picture), and Subramanian R S (right). The group wishes the new members a productive stay.