We are delighted to present the 2024 edition of the RSC Advances Emerging Investigators series! Following the success of our 2023 edition, we are excited to continue highlighting the chemistry research being conducted by some of the leading investigators in our community.
This year’s Series Editors were Professor Shirley Nakagaki (Federal University of Paraná, Brazil) and Professor Fabienne Dumoulin (Acıbadem Mehmet Ali Aydınlar Universit, Türkiye). Nine articles were selected to support emerging researchers who are already making strides in their respective fields of research, both nationally and internationally. This series focused on interesting studies showcasing researchers’ efforts to obtain information that could potentially address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Here we showcase publications that present an advance in chemistry and support societal efforts for sustainable development. Read all about the collection in this accompanying Editorial.
Ravi Kumar Pujala
Ravi Kumar Pujala is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India. He was at Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (LPS) at the University of Paris-Saclay as a Visiting Professor during 2023. Before joining IISER Tirupati, he worked as DST INSPIRE Faculty at School of Physics, University of Hyderabad, India (2017-2018). He received his Masters in Physics (2008) and Ph.D. in 2014 from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, on Dispersion Stability, Microstructure and Phase Transition of Anisotropic Nanodiscs. Subsequently, his post-doctoral stints were at (i) IESL/FORTH, Crete, Greece with Prof. George Petekidis’ Group he worked on shear-induced crystallization of colloidal hard sphere glasses and (ii) at Utrecht University, Netherlands, with Prof. Alfons van Blaaderen he investigated 3D model active particle systems. His research work involves both basic and applied outcomes of Soft Matter, in that his research group (i) studies the physics of soft matter of both passive and active systems and (ii) fabricates new mesostructured materials by self-assembly. His long-term goal is to develop new functional soft materials with reconfigurable structures at the nano and meso-scales. Ravi’s research accomplishments are well recognized through several awards including Springer Thesis International Award (2014), DST INSPIRE Faculty Award (2016) by Government of India, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Seal of Excellence for “A High-Quality Project Proposal” by European Commission (2017), Visiting Professor/Researcher at University of Paris-Saclay supported by CNRS, France (2020 and 2023), and two Core Research Grants (CRG) of the SERB, India. He also serves as the Associate Guest Editor and Review Editor of the journal Frontiers in Soft Matter. He was also featured as a Soft Matter Emerging Investigator by Soft Matter, RSC.
Valerio Fasano
Dr Valerio Fasano earned his B.Sc. from the University of Catania and M.Sc. from the University of Bologna (Italy). After a research visit to the University of Lund (Sweden), he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester (UK) under Prof. Michael Ingleson. Supported by a Royal Society of Chemistry mobility grant, he joined Prof. Douglas Stephan at the University of Toronto (Canada). He then returned to the UK as a Doctoral Prize Fellow at the University of Bristol with Prof. Varinder Aggarwal. In 2023, he became a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the University of Milan (Italy), where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2026.
Titel Jurca
Titel received his BSc in 2008 from the University of Ottawa, where he worked with Deryn Fogg on metathesis catalysts. In the interim, he spent a summer in the lab of Doug Stephan at the University of Windsor working on FLP chemistry. He returned to the University of Ottawa to pursue a PhD in main group chemistry with Darrin Richeson. He followed this with a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bristol with Ian Manners on main group polymers and a second postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University with Tobin Marks on ALD precursors. In 2017 he began his independent career at UCF where his group works on molecular inorganic, materials, and catalysis chemistry.
Ramprasad Misra and Pralok K. Samanta
Ramprasad Misra did his doctoral studies (2007-2012) in the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata, India, where he worked on signatures of intramolecular charge transfer in several novel organic molecules. Thereafter, he took up different postdoctoral roles in the University of Pittsburgh (USA), IACS and Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) before joining the current position as Research Associate in the Experimental Biophysics Group, Institute of Biology, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany in August 2020. His broad areas of interest are in Biophysical Chemistry, Physical Organic Chemistry and Molecular Spectroscopy.
Pralok K. Samanta received his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, India in 2014. He was a postdoctoral fellow at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, and at University College Dublin. Currently, Dr. Samanta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad campus. He was an Assistant Professor at GITAM (Hyderabad campus) from 2020 to 2023. His research focusses mainly on the understanding of electronic, magnetic, transport and photophysical properties of organic and organic-inorganic hybrid molecules and materials via combination of quantum mechanical approaches and molecular dynamics simulations.
Looking forward: Emerging Investigator Series 2025!
We are pleased to announce that Shirley and Fabienne will continue as the Series Editors for the 2025 Emerging Investigator series. We can’t wait to see what the next early career investigators have been working on in Chemistry!
Authors can self-nominate for participation in the Emerging Investigators Series. Articles can be submitted to the series at any time and will be accepted and published throughout the year. If you would like to be involved in our upcoming series, please look at our webpage for more information or submit now!
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Thank you so much to the Series Editors, Associate Editors and to all our reviewers at RSC Advances for their ongoing support and contribution, helping us to bring together such a fantastic collection of articles.
