Professor Abha Misra, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
Dr. Abha Misra is an Associate Professor obtained in the Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics, at Indian Institute of Science (IISc). She obtained her PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay). Thereafter, she received Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA. Dr. Misra is an Associate of Indian Academy of Sciences, member of National Science Academy and TWAS Young Affiliate. She is also a recipient of INSA Medal for Young Scientists, SERB Women Excellence Award. Dr. Misra’s research at IISc is mainly focusing on meta-devices for various sensing applications. She is an Associate Editor of RSC Advances
Dr. Karen Mulfort, Argonne National Laboratory, United States
Dr. Karen Mulfort is a Chemist in the Solar Energy Conversion Group at Argonne National Laboratory. She earned a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and was a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne. Her research program focuses on the design and discovery of molecular architectures for artificial photosynthesis, and understanding the physical, chemical, and electronic factors that contribute to effective conversion of light energy to chemical energy. Karen and her work have been recognized with the 2018 Rising Star Award from the Women Chemists Committee of the ACS and a 2018 Early Career Research Program from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Dr. Lakshminarayana Polavarapu, University of Vigo, Spain
Dr. Polavarapu is a Ramon y Cajal fellow and the principal investigator of the ‘Materials chemistry and physics’ research group at the Centro De Investigaciones Biomédicas (CINBIO), University of Vigo. He obtained an MSc in 91AV from the University of Hyderabad (India) in 2005 and his PhD in Physical 91AV from the National University of Singapore in 2011. After being a postdoctoral fellow at CIC biomaGUNE (bionanoplasmonics group) and University of Vigo (colloid chemistry group) in Spain, he joined the Chair for Photonics and Optoelectronics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany) in 2015 as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow and later continued as a junior group leader until May 2020. Recently, he moved to University of Vigo, where he leads the “Materials chemistry and Physics’ research group. He is a coauthor of over 70 publications. He was a guest editor for the themed collection on “Halide perovskite NCs” published in ‘Nanoscale’ (RSC Journal) in 2019. His current research interests include shape-controlled synthesis and self-assembly of metal and semiconductor nanocrystals for exploring their optical properties as well as a wide range of potential applications such as sensors, LEDs, photovoltaics and photocatalysis.