| Department / Centre | Description |
|---|---|
| School of Biology | The School of Biology started functioning in 2008 with the
objective of carrying out cutting-edge research in the areas spanning from single molecules to ecosystems. Our state of- the art research laboratories are well equipped for imaging, molecular biology, animal tissue culture, biochemical and biophysical work. The IISER campus at Vithura located in the Western Ghats is also ideal for field biology. Our teaching curriculum aims to provide students an exposure to a broad range of subjects in biology and gain experience in the frontier research areas of biology. Research programs in the School are funded by Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance, The Royal Society UK, Dupont Inc, CSIR, DST, DAE, DBT, and IISER TVM intramural support. The School also secured FIST funding from DST to develop the animal house, which will take ongoing research in the School a step further by incorporating animal models. Major research infrastructure in the School include: X-ray crystallography facility; Imaging facility with high-end confocal microscopes; Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorter (FACS); Plant growth chambers; FPLCs and HPLC; Biophysical instruments (Surface Plasmon Resonance, Circular dichroism spectrophotometer, fluorimeter, Isothermal titration calorimetry) and Ecology field stations.
Research work from the School has been published in several top tier journals including, PNAS USA, Nature communications, Current Biology, Genes and Development, PloS Genetics etc.
The School also hosts regular talks by visiting national and international scientists. Recent conferences and workshops conducted by the School include the International Chromosome Stability meeting series conducted biannually, Genome Biology workshop, EMBO Practical Course in cryoelectron microscopy, Tropical Pollination Biology Meeting etc.
At present, the School comprises of 15 faculty members, 3 adjunct / visiting faculty, Ph.D. students, Postdoctoral fellows, Technical Assistants, and Project Assistants. The School plans to expand its strength to ~25 faculty in the next 3-4 years strengthening existing research areas as well as adding a few contemporary research areas like neurobiology and computational biology.
Recognitions for the School of Biology faculty include S Ramachandran National Bioscience Award, Ramalingaswami and Ramanujan Fellowships, Wellcome Trust-DBT Intermediate and Early Career Fellowships and DST Swarnajayanti Fellowship. Students from the School have also received prestigious fellowships like: The EMBO Short-Term fellowship, Newton-Bhaba Ph.D. placement, PMRF, and the Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship.
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| School of Chemistry | The School of Chemistry at IISER Thiruvananthapuram was established in
2008 with a vision to teach modern chemistry with sound fundamentals and carry out frontline academics as well as applied research in all the major areas of chemistry. The department is actively involved in developing major research areas of inorganic and Organometallic chemistry, Synthetic Organic chemistry, Transition Metal Catalysis for (Targeted) Organic Synthesis, Radical Chemistry, Organic Synthesis by Photoredox Catalysis, Metal Catalysis, Physical Organic Chemistry, Supramolecular Chemistry, Molecular Switches and Machines, Foldamer Chemistry, DNA Nanotechnology, Photophysics and Photochemistry of Nanomaterials and Hybrid materials, NMR spectroscopy, Fuel Cell Electrocatalysis, Theoretical chemistry, Computational Chemistry and Nonlinear Dynamics.
In the experimental front, the department has a large number of state-of-the-art research facilities such as  500 & 700 MHz NMR in our central instrumentation facilities , Femtosecond transient absorption, Single crystal X-ray diffractometer, Powder X-ray diffractometer, Scanning electron microscope and departmental instrumental facilities such as Superfluid Critical Chromatography (SFC), Rheometer, Atomic force Microscope, Confocal and Fluorescence microscopes, Circular Dichroism (CD) and Vibrational CD spectrometer, Electrochemical workstations, Absorption spectrometer (both Near-IR and UV-Vis), Fluorescence Emission spectrometer, Raman spectrometer, Circular Dichroism spectrometer, Fluorimeter, Nanosecond transient absorption, Picosecond fluorescence, Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), Thermogravimetric analyser, Microwave Reactor, DNA and peptide synthesisers, GCMS, LCMS, GPC, HPLC, etc. The computational facilities include 3 clusters with a total of 120 processors.
Our faculty members have been recognised with various laurels, grants and awards for their significant contributions in chemistry, some of these include Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize, Sastra-CNR Rao award, CRSI Bronze and silver Medals, J. C. Bose Fellowship, DST Materials Science Research India Award, INSA Ramanujan Fellowship, DST Swarnajayanti Fellowship, DST Young Investigator Award, Boston Young Scientist Award, KSCSTE Young Scientist award, Asian Photochemistry Inspire Faculty Grant, DST Young Associate, Bhagyatara Award. etc. Additionally, the department boasts of some of its faculty being elected Fellows of Science academies, namely, Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science ACademy. Some are serving as editorial members in various journals of international repute (viz. RSC Advances, Photochemical-Photobiologcal Sciences, ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces) in addition to being associate editors.
35 PhD students have graduated already and few them have gone on to secure academic positions in India. Our students have won Eli-Lilly Best Thesis Awards, Malhotra Weikfield Foundation-Bangalore Nano Young Scientist Award, etc. 160 BSMS students have graduated  thus far from the school of chemistry, and  several have qualified CSIR-JRF and GATE exams. 3 Students have also been selected from our school for the Lindau Nobel Laureate meetings. Several students have won best poster/oral presentation in various conferences with national and international repute.
The School of Chemistry has a vibrant academic and research ambience with 19 faculty members, 2 emeritus professors, 65 PhD students, 5 research associates, 10 project assistants and 100 BS-MS students who have opted for chemistry as the major. The school also hosts a large number of undergraduate and postgraduate students for short projects.
The School of Chemistry has recently organised the first "Frontiers Symposium in Chemistry (FS-CHM) - 2020 at IISER TVM during Jan-2020. Several eminent speakers and notable dignitaries within India and across the globe gave talks and showcased their pathbreaking research findings. Recently, the school also conducted two joint symposia with the cooperative support from Royal Society of chemistry, UK, viz. IISER TVM-RSC Joint Salters Symposium during 10-12 January 2020 and IISERTVM-RSC Symposium on Advances in Chemical Sciences during 04 February 2020. College teachers and students from various parts of Kerala attended and benefited from these two symposia.
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| School of Mathematics | The School of Mathematics at IISER Thiruvananthapuram is one of
the foundational schools established in the Institute, since its inception in the year 2008. The primary mission of the school has been to impart quality math education in all areas of Mathematics, pure and abstract as well as application-oriented ones by the members of the school who are involved in pioneering research in classical as well as emergent areas of the discipline. Frontier research areas of the faculty members of the school include, but is not limited to, Group Theory, Homological Algebra, Commutative Algebra, Number Theory, Algebraic Geometry, Representation Theory, Partial Differential Equations, Scientific Computing, Complex Dynamics, Ergodic Theory, Matrix Analysis, Mathematical Finance, Differential Geometry and Harmonic Analysis.
The faculty members of SoM are involved in setting up a state-of-the-art research facilities such as high performance computing cluster, mathematical financial engineering and data science research laboratory in IISER-TVM.
The faculty members in the school of Mathematics publish in top-notch journals in their respective fields such as the Journal of Differential Equations, Communications in Mathematical Physics, Bulletin des Sciences Mathematiques, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, Discrete Mathematics, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, International Journal of Mathematics, Journal of Algebra, Mathematische Zeitschrift, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.
Various training schools and workshops have been conducted in SoM, such as Annual Foundation Schools, Mathematics Training and Talent Search Workshops, Conference of Indian Women and Mathematics, etc. The school will soon host the BRICS conference, in 2021.
At present, the school has fifteen permanent faculty members, one contractual faculty member and two adjunct faculty members. The School provides a wonderful environment for students to learn mathematics. At present, we have 68 BS-MS students across various years and more than 20 students pursuing their research.
Several of our graduate students have gone on to various institutes and universities within the country and abroad. These include the University of Tubingen, Germany, Montanuniversitat Leoben, Austria, University of Pavia, Italy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Florida, University of York, Brown University, University of Connecticut, Binghamton University, New York, TIFR-Mumbai and Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi
The school offers Ph.D. Programme, Integrated Ph.D. Programme and BS-MS Programme with major in Mathematics. The school also hosts a Summer Visiting Students' Programme, for the benefit of students at any level from various universities and institutes from all around.
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| School of Physics | The School of Physics was established at the inception of
the Institute in 2008 with the aim of providing quality education and engage in cutting-edge research both in fundamental and applied Physics. At present, the faculty strength is 22, including 8 theoretical physicists and 13 engaged in experimental physics. Research areas include experimental and theoretical condensed matter, light-matter interaction, optics, quantum technologies and communication, high-energy physics, gravitational physics, string theory and dynamics of complex systems. A large fraction of the research undertaken in the School is multidisciplinary in nature and covers technologically relevant areas. The School continues to attract national and international extramural grants and that has led to the establishment of world-class laboratories to do frontline research in fundamental and applied physics. Recently the School has secured INR 2.45 Crores to establish a new low-temperature facility through the FIST scheme of DST, Govt. of India. And, Dr. Anil Shaji and Dr. Madhu Thalakulam jointly received a major grant of 11 Crores from the Dept. of Science and Technology under the Quantum Information Science and Technology program. The School has excellent in-house research facilities like terahertz spectroscopy, low-temperature and high field magneto-electric measurements, dilution refrigerator for measurements down to ultracold (milli Kelvin) temperatures, electrochemical workstations, various thin film coating and, lithography techniques for device fabrication, scanning probe microscopy facility, and commensurate characterization facilities. The facilities supplement those available in the Central Instrument Facility of the Institute e.g. TEM, SEM, XPS, PPMS, SQUID etc. The School continues to add and upgrade the facilities, ensuring access to the latest research techniques. The School also houses the Institute’s High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster of 120 TFLOPS capacity, which is ranked 20th in terms of computing power in the India Supercomputer List of 2019. The cluster has 86 Computing Nodes including 2 GPU Nodes, 2500 processing cores along with a storage capacity of 500TB.
Researchers at the school actively publish their quality research in various notable journals such as Nature Communications, ACS Nano, Advanced Energy Materials, Nanoscale, Scientific Reports, Physical Review, Applied Physics Letters, Journal of High Energy Physics and the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Strong international collaborations have been established with various national and international institutes through bilateral research projects and through MOUs. The School is visited by scientists from these collaborating institutes like Max Planck Institutes in Germany, Universities of Cambridge, Glasgow and Surrey in the United Kingdom and several universities in the United States. The School regularly conducts seminars, workshops, conferences, and webinars periodically and invites visitors and students to the campus as a part of outreach activities that include a dedicated summer visiting program.
At present, the School comprises 22 faculty members and 7 technical staff members along with PhD, integrated PhD and BS-MS Physics(Major) students. The School aims to expand its faculty strength in the next 2-3 years in different fundamental and advanced areas.
Several faculty members have won national and international research fellowships and awards, such as Ramanujan and Inspire Fellowships, Max Planck Fellowships, DAE Young Scientist, KSCSTE Young Scientist Award etc. Students and alumni of the School have also been recipients of various national and international fellowships and have gone on to pursue their career in prestigious academic institutions across the world.
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