Short Bio:
Ramesh Laxminarayan Gardas was born and brought up in Surat, Gujarat. He completed B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Veer Narmad South Gujarat University. Then he joined University of Coimbra, and University of Aveiro, Portugal, and Queen’s University Belfast, UK, for his postdoctoral research on physico-chemical properties and applications of ionic liquids.
Then, Dr. Gardas joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, in 2010, as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015 and full Professor in 2020.
Dr. Gardas has more than 23-years of research and 13-years of teaching experience. So far, he has completed 8 projects (as PI and Co-PI) worth more than Rs. 6.5 crores, guided 14 Ph.D. and 17 M.Sc. project students. Co-authored 4 patents, 11 book-chapters, 7 conference papers, 4 Editorials, and more than 200 research publications which received more than 8900 citations with h-index = 47 and average citations per paper of above 40. He has delivered more than 300 invited talks and guest lectures.
Dr. Gardas’ research group focuses on ‘Chemical Thermodynamics’ and ‘Phase Equilibria’ of industrially important solvents and their mixtures. His research group, is unique in the country, focuses on both ‘Science’ and ‘Technology’ part of the contemporary field – “Ionic Liquids/ Deep Eutectic Solvents as an alternative to Volatile Organic Solvents” and significantly contributes to connecting them. His research group substantially contributed to the development of non-conventional and environmentally benign solvent systems. Generated extensive databases on their thermodynamic properties and structure-composition-property correlations useful in refrigeration, separation science, and crude oil industry. These will have far-reaching implications in the design of application-specific solvent systems. His research group strives to design the task-specific ionic liquids and to provide an important insight into physical chemistry to regulate their properties for varied technological applications such as phase change materials, CO2 capturing, dissolution of tank bottom sludge, electrolytes in solar cell and supercapacitors, absorbents for refrigeration system, desulfurization of fuels, and also the extraction of metal ions, biomolecules, and value-added products.
More than 18,000 thermodynamic data points measured in his research lab at IIT Madras are included in NIST Standard Reference Database developed by Thermodynamics Research Center, NIST, USA. Dr. Gardas developed a model to explain the density of various ionic liquids over a wide range of temperature and pressure, which is referred to and extensively used by the peer scientific community as 'Gardas and Coutinho' model.
In recognition of his outstanding performance as a teacher and researcher, Dr. Gardas has been bestowed with several awards by prestigious institutes/ societies, including the Mid-Career R&D Award – 2020 and Best Teacher – 2023 by IIT Madras. Recently, he has been recognized as (i) Associate Editor of an American Chemical Society Journal, Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data, (ii) Fellow Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), UK, (iii) Asian Thermophysical Properties Research (ATPC) Significant Contribution Award 2022, (iv) Publons Top Peer Review Award 2019 (Top 1% of Reviewers in Chemistry), and (v) Featured in the list of “World Ranking of Top 2% Scientists” in database created by experts at Stanford University, USA, for consecutively 5 years from 2019 to 2023.
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