Dr. Rohit Batra joined the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at IIT Madras as Assistant Professor in July 2022. Prior to this, he had completed two Post-doctoral doctoral appointments, one at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Lab, and the other at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Rohit received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut and B.Tech. in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from IIT Roorkee. Before joining IIT Madras, he also had a 4-month stint at Rivian Automotive LLC R&D lab for cell manufacturing and battery development.
Rohit's research interest lies in the area of combining computational and data-driven methods to design new materials. He has expertise in first-principles electronic structure methods, molecular dynamics simulations, and many machine learning (ML) based techniques, particularly geared towards the general field of chemical and materials science.
Materials Informatics
Materials modeling
Autonomous AI-driven materials laboratory
Sustainable polymer design
Overcoming human bias using AI
2022 - Till date
Assistant Professor
2025 - Samar and Jayanti Paul Early Career Chair
2021 - IEEE Chicago Early Career Award in Nanotechnology