PI: Nandini Bhandaru

Nandini Bhandaru is a Chemical Engineer and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Birla Institute of Science and Technology (BITS) Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, India. She completed her Ph.D. in 2016 from Instability and Soft Patterning Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur working with Dr. Rabibrata Mukherjee. She worked as DST INSPIRE Faculty at IIT Kanpur for one year.

Her area of research is on Nanofabrication including Soft-Lithography, Thin-film dewetting, Polymer blend films, Self-assembly, and Superomniphobic surfaces.

She has 4 Indian patents and 25 papers in international journals.

For her M Tech thesis, she won the INAE best M Tech thesis award in 2012. In 2013 she won the “Gandhian Innovation Award” given by Techpedia and National Innovation Foundation. She was selected as one of the six participants from India to attend ESONN (Nano School) at Grenoble, France in 2013. Her work was also part of an Innovation Show Power of Shunya on Economic Times Now TV show. She is the recipient of the Young Scientist Award 2015 from the Materials Research Society of India, Kolkata Chapter, and the European Materials Research Society's Young Scientist Award during their Spring Meeting in May 2016 at Lille France. Her Ph.D. thesis won the Shah-Schulman Award for Best Thesis in the field of Colloid and Interface Science in 2016 and the G. C. Jain Memorial Award from MRSI in 2018. She also received the Young Scientist Award from the Indian Science Congress Association in Engineering Sciences for the year 2017.