Research Area

• Energy storage (supercapacitors, hybrid energy systems)
• Clean hydrogen
• Solar energy harnessing (PV, plasmon-enhanced solar distillation)
• Solar-driven water treatment
• Computational materials design

Experience

• 2024 - Till date

  Professor

• 2019 - 2024

  Associate Professor

• 2015 - 2019

  Assistant Professor

About

Tiju Thomas holds MS and PhD degrees from Cornell University (NY, USA). He works in interdisciplinary areas that straddle materials engineering and allied areas (nanochemistry, electrical engineering, applied physicists and solid state chemistry). He also has an MS (Engg.) from the Theoretical Sciences Unit in Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. His group focuses on developing compositionally complex oxides, oxynitrides and nitrides, and nanometals for achieving engineering ends. Problems concerning the functional properties of materials are of abiding interest to him.
In particular next-generation energy storage (supercapacitors, hybrid energy storage systems), nanotech-enabled solar energy harvesting, and solar-driven water treatment have been the group's recent focus. The group's work on, on-demand hydrogen production is internationally well-known.
Eco-friendly, green engineering perspectives guide the computational materials design, synthetic chemical and fabrication routes that the group develops. Furthermore, correlations between materials processes and device performance are emerging in the group's activities.
The group is diverse and vibrant beca...

Selected Journal Publications

• Ambesh Gupta, Adithyan TR, Sreeram Kalpathy, Tiju Thomas, Analysis of non-noble plasmonic enhanced solar distillation using computed optical activities, Desalination (2022) .
• Smarak Rath, Sudha Priyanga, Nagappan N, Tiju Thomas, Discovery of direct band gap perovskites for light harvesting by using machine learning, Computational Materials Science 210(7):111476 (2022).
• Arvind Pujari and Tiju Thomas, Aluminium Nanoparticles Alloyed with Other Earth-Abundant Plasmonic Metals for Light-Trapping in Thin-Film a-Si Solar Cells, Sustainable Materials and Technologies (2021) .

Recognitions

• 2022

  Elected Member, Royal Society of Chemistry (London)

• 2022

  Young Scientist Award (Engineering Sciences), Academy of Sciences (Chennai)

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