Dr. Kausik S Das is an award winning professor of Physics and the Director of the Center for Student Excellence at the School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES).
Dr. Das is passionate about undergraduate teaching and research and he believes in the holistic development of students by integrating teaching and research at the undergraduate level. He has developed hundreds of cartoon clicker questions to provoke vigorous group discussions on critical thinking questions in classrooms, created corresponding hands-on active learning labs to further investigate their understanding and created modular research projects so that students can gain authentic research experiences. In a nutshell he believes in overall growth of undergraduate students and turning them as potential next gen leaders of science and technology.
He is deeply interested in interdisciplinary curiosity driven research that involves observation, physical and biological experiments, computation and minimal qualitative theories. In recent times Dr. Das's research students have discovered a new type of light activated memristors, developed a method to achieve mixing in low Reynolds number microfluidic flow, demonstrated electricity generation by electrogenic bacteria in a microbial fuel cell (MFC), generated plasma using a kitchen microwave and characterized it, analyzed nanoscale fluid transport, created nano inductors by laser scribed graphene etc.
He is also involved in the astronaut training program through Project PoSSUM and has flown in Zero-g parabolic flights. Under his supervision his undergraduate students at UMES have built a zero-g solid body rotation payload that flew in two parabolic flights to collect valuable data.
Before joining UMES Dr. Das was a teaching faculty member and a Research Associate in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, Canada for four years. He was also an adjunct professor of Physics at Ryerson university, Canada.
Dr. Das has done his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. J.K.Bhattacharjee at the Indian Association for the cultivation of Science, India on Linear and Nonliner Stability Analysis of Surface Tension Driven (Marangoni) Convection.
After finishing his Ph.D he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara to do postdoctoral research under the supervision of Prof. George M. (Bud) Homsy followed by University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (in collaboration with the University of Oxford, UK) under the supervisions of Prof. Stephen Wilson (Strathclyde) and Prof. David Kenning (Oxford), and at the University of Toronto under the supervisions of Prof. Stephen Morris, Prof. Charles Ward and Prof. M. Kawaji.
Contact Details
Dr. Kausik S Das,
Professor, Physics,
Director, SANS Center for Student Excellence,
University of Maryland Eastern Shore,
Rm. 3006, Hazel Hall, Princess Anne,
MD, 21853.
email: kdas@umes.edu
Ph: 4106516034