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Dr. Debotra Sarkar joined the Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras as an Assistant Professor in 2025. His research focuses on the design, synthesis, and mechanistic understanding of low-valent main-group compounds, with particular emphasis on their applications in small-molecule activation, redox chemistry, and catalysis.

Dr. Sarkar obtained his M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2015 and his Ph.D. in 2020 from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Shigeyoshi Inoue, as a DAAD Doctoral Research Fellow. He subsequently carried out postdoctoral research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) with Prof. Peter Roesky, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Hyderabad, with Prof. Vadapalli Chandrasekhar, and at the University of Oxford, UK, with Prof. Simon Aldridge, as a Walter Benjamin Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Before joining IIT Madras, he briefly served as an Assistant Professor at IIT (BHU), Varanasi.