Narayanan Chandrakumar

Narayanan Chandrakumar (born 25 November 1951) is an Indian chemical physicist and a professor of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He was the founder of the first Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) laboratory in India and is known for developing a new technique for NMR imaging and diffusion measurement. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1996, for his contributions to chemical sciences.

Biography

N. Chandrakumar, born on 25 November 1951, in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, graduated in chemistry from Loyola College, Chennai in 1970 and completed his master's degree at IIT Madras in 1972. He holds seven patents for the processes he has developed. His researches have been detailed in two monographs, Modern techniques in high-resolution FT-NMR and Spin-1 NMR and several articles published in peer-reviewed journals. ResearchGate, an online article repository, has listed 85 of them. He has also edited the journals Magnetic Resonance, Diamond Jubilee Special Issue of the Proceedings (Chemical Sciences) of the Indian Academy of Sciences. He has also supervised several doctoral scholars in their studies. He was awarded the Millennium Medal by the Indian Science Congress Association in 2000 and the Chemical Research Society of India awarded him the Silver Medal in 2008. The award orations he has delivered include Professor R. K. Asundi Memorial Lecture (2002), the Professor K. Rangadhama Rao Memorial Lecture (2004) of the Indian National Science Academy and the Professor N. Venkatasubramanian Endowment Lecture (2003). The Indian Academy of Sciences elected him as their fellow in 1993 and he became a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 1997. He also held the INSA-DFG Exchange Fellowship in 1988, Fellowship of the Max Planck Gesellschaft in 1989 and, 1990, INSA Visiting Fellowship for MRI / MRS Research at AIIMS in 1994, Honorary Senior Fellowship of the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research in 1997 and the J. C. Bose National Fellowship in 2009.