Dr. Gaurab Ganguly is an ANRF Ramanujan Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Birla Institute of Technology (BIT) Mesra, Ranchi, and the department's first Ramanujan Fellow. He is a theoretical and computational chemist specialising in inorganic photochemistry and electronic-structure theory. His research develops predictive theoretical frameworks to understand how light, electron spin and relativistic effects govern the excited-state properties and photochemical reactivity of transition-metal complexes.
Before joining BIT Mesra, Dr. Ganguly held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Vienna, Austria; the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (IOCB), Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague; and the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA. In Vienna, he received a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship under the European Union's Horizon Europe programme, with an evaluation score of 97%. He independently led research on molecular solar-thermal energy storage, combining advanced electronic-structure calculations with mechanistic analysis and predictive molecular design. He received his Ph.D. from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata, under the supervision of Prof. Ankan Paul.
Dr. Ganguly has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed research articles in leading international journals, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, JACS Au, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Inorganic Chemistry, and the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation. His research spans fundamental theory and collaborative studies with experimental groups in spectroscopy and inorganic chemistry. He has also delivered invited research seminars at international institutions, including the University of Graz, Austria and the University of Manchester, UK.
At BIT Mesra, Dr. Ganguly is establishing an independent research programme at the interface of theoretical inorganic chemistry, excited-state photochemistry and sustainable energy science. He focuses on spin-dependent photochemical mechanisms, excited-state energy and electron transfer, and molecular solar-thermal energy storage. The overarching goal is to translate fundamental insights into transferable design principles for photoactive molecules, while advancing theory-experiment collaborations and training students in advanced electronic-structure methods and high-performance computational chemistry.