Energy Engineering Proceedings of CAETS 2015 Convocation on Pathways to Sustainability

K.V. Raghavan  received his B.Tech from Osmania University in 1964 and a MS and PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, India. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChE), and the A. P. Akademi of Sciences (APAS), and is a Distinguished Fellow of the University of Grants Commission (UGC). Dr. Raghavan took up the distinguished Professorship of the INAE at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad, in 2008. He became the Vice President (International Cooperation) of the INAE in 2011.

He has held various levels of scientific positions in three national laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) of India. He was appointed as the Director of Central Leather Research Institute, Chennai in 1994, and in 1996 he took over the Directorship of the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad. On successful completion of this tenure, he was appointed as the Chairman of Recruitment and Assessment Centre of DRDO, Ministry of Defence, Government of India in May 2004. In addition, Dr. Raghavan chairs scientific committees of public and private sector bodies on clean technologies, catalytic ethanol reforming, biorefining and allied areas. The recipient of six national awards, Dr. Raghavan has published more than 150 papers, filed 45 patents and edited five books. Chemical process development and design, reaction engineering, simulation and modeling, and chemical hazard analysis are his areas of specialization. His basic research contributions cover the simulation of complex reactions in fixed bed reactors, hydrodynamics of multiphase reaction systems, envirocatalysis for clean processing, zeolite catalysis for macromolecules, thermochemistry, and kinetics of charge transfer polymerization and modeling of chemical accidents. His current research activities are in process intensification of water gas shift reaction, catalyticCO ₂  decomposition, analysis of CO ₂  capture technologies and characterization of the reactivity of ionic liquids.

Purnendu Ghosh  is the Executive Director, Birla Institute of Scientific Research, Jaipur. Prior to this he was Professor at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland; University of Melbourne, Australia; National Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF), Braunschweig, Germany. He has taken a lead role in augmenting bioprocess engineering and biotechnology activities in the country as a member of several Task Forces of the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. He is currently the Chief Editor of Publications of Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is a columnist of a leading newspaper group. Besides technical publications, he has written books of different genre.