Congratulations to Priyank Kumar who received a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) 2021 round 1 announced today.
With a success rate of only 17 percent, Dr Kumar’s project “A predictive, ab initio design of enhanced plasmonic photocatalysts” was among the 200 awarded in this round. By utilising state-of-the-art ab initio computations, Dr Kumar will design an efficient plasmonic photocatalyst that will provide insights on various atomic-level reaction steps involved and consequently develop a set of catalyst design principles to guide experiments.
Outcomes from this work will benefit the renewable energy sector and chemical industries by generating knowledge in catalysis relevant for hydrogen production and greenhouse gas reduction.
Dr Priyank Kumar is currently a Scientia fellow in the School of Chemical Engineering at University of New South Wales, and is also an Associate Investigator in the FLEET Centre. His research focused on designing atomically-thin materials and plasmonic nanostructures for applications in electronics, optoelectronics and photo(electro) catalysis using ab initio computational methods such as density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT (TDDFT).
Following a Bachelor degree in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India, he pursued his PhD in Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He started his academic career as a Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich, Switzerland before moving to Sydney.
A three-year grant including up to $50,000 per annum, the ARC DECRA scheme specifically provides focused research support for early career researchers working on national priority areas.
Dr Priyank Kumar research page and Linkedin profile.