Prof. Sourav Pal is currently the Professor and Head of Chemistry at Ashoka University (since October 2022). He joined NCL in 1982 as a scientist and served for 33 years, superannuating as its director in 2015. Afterward, he joined IIT Bombay as a Professor of Chemistry (June 2015–May 2020) and later served as the Director of IISER Kolkata (October 2017–October 2022). He is a distinguished theoretical chemist and has contributed to methodological and conceptual developments in many-body electronic structure theory, the area of density-based chemical reactivity, as well as catalytic and hydrogen storage materials using computational material science. During his tenure at NCL, he was instrumental in establishing the Electronic Structure Theory Group. In particular, he is well known for his contributions to the development of rigorous ab-initio coupled-cluster theory for molecular electronic structure. Prof. Pal obtained his 5-year integrated Master’s degree in Chemistry from the IIT Kanpur in 1977, and his Ph.D. from Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1982. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA (1986–87), and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (1987). He was a visiting professor at the University of Arizona, USA; University of Torun, Poland; and the Institute for Molecular Sciences, Okazaki, Japan. He was an Adjunct Professor at IISER Pune and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at IIT Kharagpur. He presently holds an Adjunct Professorship at IIT Goa. 

Prof. Pal has received the prestigious SASTRA-CNR Rao Award in Chemistry & Materials Science for the year 2014, and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Chemical Sciences in 2000. He is also a recipient of the J. C. Bose National Fellowship of DST (2008 - 2022), INSA Young Scientist Award in 1987 and the CSIR Young Scientist Prize in 1989. He has also delivered the prestigious Charles Coulson Lecture of University of Georgia, USA in 2014 and has earned several other prominent awards and honors. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2011), , Indian National Science Academy (2003), National Academy of Sciences (1998), Indian Academy of Sciences (1996), and the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences (1994). He has been on the editorial board of several journals and has guided more than 45 Ph.D. theses and published more than 300 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. He has authored a book titled Mathematics in Chemistry and contributed chapters to several other books.