Class of 2005

Dr. Hrishit Banerjee, MInstP, MRSC, is an Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of Dundee in Scotland, UK, where he joined the School of Science and Engineering in January, 2024. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a Visiting Scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is a member of both the Institute of Physics (MInstP), UK, and the Royal Society of Chemistry (MRSC), UK.

By training is a theoretical physicist working in the field of condensed matter physics. He has over 12 years of experience in working in the field of electronic structure theory focussing on novel materials.

Dr. Banerjee did his doctoral work (August 2012-June 2018) at the S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata and obtained his PhD in 2019 from the University of Calcutta. After he finished his PhD in June 2018, he was awarded the Training and Research in Italian Laboratories (TRIL) Research Fellowship from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy and worked at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) Instituto SPIN in Italy till March 2019. Thereafter he worked as a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Graz University of Technology, Austria (April 2019- April 2021). After this, his focus and attention shifted to energy and environment-based research, and he moved to the University of Cambridge, UK (April 2021-Jan 2024), to study using various advanced theoretical methods the physics behind degradation of rechargeable battery materials. He was funded by the Battery Degradation project of The Faraday Institute, the flagship battery research consortium in UK

Dr. Banerjee has been awarded several fellowships including the prestigious ESPRIT fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund amounting to EUR 32500 and has won several awards for talks and posters. He is a reviewer of several high impact international journals in the field of Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Science, and has been invited to be featured author in a Springer Nature journal. He has been invited to speak at notable international conferences like Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, Germany, Materials Research Society, USA, European Materials Research Society, Poland, The Faraday Institution conference, UK etc. and have given several invited talks at notable institutes such as University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin, La Sapienza University of Rome, College de France, Technische Universitaet Wien to name a few.

Dr. Banerjee hopes to contribute to the understanding of energy materials to design better longer lasting batteries, solar cells etc leading to an overall energy transition, and towards a net-zero revolution in the World.

Sohang joined Dolna in 1997 in lower nursery and graduated top of his class in 2012.

Following a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Presidency University and a Master’s from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, he traveled to the United States on a fully funded scholarship to the PhD program in Physical Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. During his doctoral studies, Sohang published 18 research papers in international journals with his advisor Dr. Nancy Makri. His work was recognized with multiple graduate scholarships and invited talks at several US and international conferences, culminating in him receiving the annual dissertation award from the University of Illinois’ Department of Chemistry in 2023. Following his PhD, Sohang joined Dr. Timothy Berkelbach’s research group at Columbia University where he currently holds the position of a postdoctoral research scientist.

Sohang’s thesis has been recognized with the 2024 Justin Jankunas Doctoral Dissertation Award in Chemical Physics by the American Physical Society for its contributions to the understanding of photosynthetic light harvesting using Feynman path integrals.

Class of 2004

Thirumoy Banerjee  is a New Delhi-based journalist with the Press Trust of India (PTI) and has an overall experience of over 14 years. He has previously worked with leading media houses, including The Times of India, Business Standard, The Indian Express, and The Telegraph. He has been a visiting faculty at premier institutes, including the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, several DU colleges, VIT, etc. Thirumoy has been associated with reputed publishing houses, such as Scholastic, and regularly contributes to their books and journals. He has also translated a book (Yamraaj 5003) from Odia to English. He can be reached on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram @thiru_the_moy .