Ph. D in Chemistry

Welcome to the Chemistry Department of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The department’s research program is among the most important research initiatives in India. With current faculty strength of 34 faculty members and their collaborators worldwide, and with nearly 300 Ph. D. scholars at any time of the year for the last several years, the contribution of the department to India’s basic and applied chemistry research is on par with the best in the country and is internationally well recognized. The facilities available in the department include state-of-the-art NMR spectrometer, Atomic Force Microscope, single crystal and powder XRD, MALDI and GCMS, to name a few. In addition to serving the needs of the department, these instrument facilities are available to researchers in other departments of the Institute and to scientists throughout the country. The service afforded by the department to the scientific community in India has few parallels.

The Ph. D. programme of the department is as comprehensive as sustained quality research in any area would demand. Also, students are admitted through a rigorous screening process after a basic qualifying requirement to attend a personal interview which is now conducted throughout the year. The selected students are generally given the freedom of choice of joining research groups and must complete course work and a comprehensive examination within the first two years in most cases and with few exceptions. They must give a research seminar within the first three years on the subject of their research and present reports every six months until they are ready to graduate; at that time they must give a second seminar giving details of their work and publications, and follow it by a presentation of a Synopsis of the actual thesis document before submitting the thesis. All of this is monitored by a Doctoral Committee, which oversees the progress at regular intervals and is unique to every scholar.

Our Department also offers its felicitations to all the Ph. D. graduates from the department who are engaged in academic, scientific, and professional endeavor in India and abroad and salutes those who have retired from an active professional career, for their distinguished services.