Thalappil Pradeep is an Institute Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India. He is also an Institute Chair Professor and Professor of Chemistry. He earned his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science in 1991 and had post doctoral training at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and Purdue University, West Lafayette. He held visiting positions at many leading universities and institutes in Asia and Europe. Prof. Pradeep’s research interests are in molecular and nanoscale materials and he develops instrumentation for such studies. He has authored 375 scientific papers in journals and is an inventor of over 70 patents or patent applications. His papers have received about 15000 citations and his h-index is 60. He is involved in the development of affordable technologies for drinking water purification and some of his technologies have been commercialized.
His pesticide removal technology has been incorporated in about 1.5 million filters and the technology is estimated to have reached about 7.5 million people. Along with his associates, he has incubated two companies and one of them has a production unit. His arsenic removal technology, which has been approved for national implementation, has reached about 500,000 people already. He is a recipient of several awards including the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Prize, BM Birla Science Prize, National Award for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, India Nanotech Innovation Award and JC Bose National Fellowship. He is an adjunct professor at the Institute of Life Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, Coimbatore and is also a member of the Graduate Faculty of Purdue University, USA.
He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences (India) and Royal Society of Chemistry. He is the author of the introductory textbook, Nano: The Essentials (McGraw-Hill) and is one of the authors of the monograph, Nanofluids (Wiley-Interscience) and an advanced textbook, A Textbook of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (McGraw-Hill). He is on the editorial boards of journals such as Nano Reviews, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, Particle, Surface Innovations, Chemistry-An Asian Journal, Nanoscale and Scientific Reports and is an associate editor of the American Chemical Society Journal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. His science has been featured by Scientific American, CNN, The Guardian (UK), C&E News, New Scientist, and many others apart from the national media. His other interests include education, popularization of science and development of advanced teaching aids. He has authored a few popular science books in Malayalam and is the recipient of Kerala Sahitya Academi Award for knowledge literature for the year 2010. In 2015, he received the Lifetime Achievement Research Award of IIT Madras. For more information, please see, http://www.dstuns.iitm.ac.in/pradeep-research-group.php. As part of his additional social commitment, he supports a school in his village where 500 students are on the rolls.
