Alumni Interview: Prof. Dipankar Banerjee

Prof. Dipankar Banerjee a well known researcher, is an alumnus of IIT Madras. He served as the director of the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory from 1996 to 2003. Dr. Banerjee has held research positions at world’s premier metallurgical institutions including the Carnegie Mellon University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, and GE Corporate Research and Development Laboratory, Schenectady, USA. He was Chief Controller, R&D of DRDO from 2003-2010, and in that position he coordinated the aeronautical and materials programmes of DRDO. He is currently Professor, Department of Materials Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science. Prof. Banerjee chairs the research council of NIIST, Thiruvananthapuram (National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology). He also serves on the board of governors of IIT Madras and chairs the GTMAP program of ARDB, Govt. of India. He has been conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Defence Research & Development Organisation.

Even before you joined IIT, you had a research background. Is it so?

Yes that’s right. I grew up in IITM campus because my father was the head of the organic chemistry department. I spent most of my childhood in IITM.

We would like to know about your stay at IIT Madras. What motivated you to take up research and then come back to IITM for PhD?

Choosing IIT Madras was simple. At the time when I was growing up, everybody wanted to study engineering or medicine. So I went into engineering. With regards to what motivated me to do research, I suspect it’s the fact that I grew up in this campus and my father was in research and it seemed an interesting and exciting kind of thing to do. There were choices in terms of whether I should go abroad to do a PhD or whether I should stay in India and due to various personal reasons at the time I decided to stay back in India.

Are there any specific things you remember from IIT Madras? Any professor?

I remember IIT most for making friends and the hostel life than actual metallurgy or materials engineering. Teaching was always good. Some of our teachers were absolutely outstanding. I particularly remember someone called Sridhar who taught us phase diagrams which was the first course that we took in metallurgy. He really was an excellent teacher and that stayed with me right through because I did physical metallurgy subsequently. That interest in physical metallurgy was created by that one good teacher in our first course in metallurgy. I think the quality of teaching and how teaching excites you make an enormous difference.

Do you remember any funny incidents from your time at IIT Madras?

It was all fun. I played cricket for IIT. It’s just that the friendships we made during that period of 5 years have stayed right through. Even now we get together whenever people come to Bangalore. So, in that sense, it was very enjoyable. The quality of teaching and how teaching excites you make an enormous difference.

At that time there weren’t many new hostels, most of the infrastructure wasn’t there. How different was life at IITM in those days?

It was very different from what it is now. It wasn’t bad. Food was separate for different hostels, now you have a common eating area. Most of us went outside the Velachery Gate to get a coffee. That’s how it was. He laughs.

How did you choose your research field?

It’s because of my supervisors. When I came to IISc, I had two research supervisors: one was Prof. K I Vasu who is in the metallurgy department, and the other was Dr. Arunachalam, who was then at the National Aeronautical Laboratory. It was Dr. Arunachalam who was excited about looking at intermetallic compounds for high temperature applications. He wanted to look at this new material everyone was talking about, the intermetallic called TiAl. So he sort of decided that this was going to be my research topic.

You worked in lot of places like CMU and University of Michigan. What are the startling differences you find between the research culture in India and the research culture abroad?

I think the research culture abroad is driven to a very large extent by the funding available. So it is far more demanding on both research students and professors because they are all competing very hard for a certain amount of money. The financial aspects of research depend upon your ability to get funding and your ability to deliver research. So there is a tight link. If you look at the research situation here, a PhD student is paid by the government of India. So there is no link between the salary he gets and the research funding that a professor gets. In other words, I am getting my PhD student for free. It is not linked to the money I get to do a project. The second aspect is the American salaries, I am talking more about America than Europe. An American university pays only 9 months a year and you have to get three months salary out of the money you get from projects. So both your personal salary as well as your human resources are PhD students. Postdoctoral fellows are paid out of project funds. So it is very important then to deliver for the money that you are getting. We are not so tightly linked here. This is both good and bad. It is good because it allows people to do what they want without worrying too much about project funding, and it is bad because the accountability is low. Other differences are in terms of research infrastructure. It is simply the fact that if you are in Europe or America, companies that supply you with research infrastructure, let’s say Atom Probes and STM’s and so on, the response time to problems with the equipment is very quick. We simply don’t get that kind of response. When things go down, the procedures to replace with spares and the availability of experts to maintain the equipment is little more difficult. Infrastructure in terms of power, water and things like that which are important for research is poorer here. For example the power goes off, things fail. So you have to work that much harder to keep things going. So these are the two aspects that I think make research a little bit more difficult. The third aspect is that most of students from IITs are not coming into research. All of us work in science, and it’s the quality of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows that largely determine the quality of research. But, certainly the cream of Indian undergraduate students is not coming into research. So, what do we do about it? I do not know!

Sir, you are one of the members of the governing board of IITM. Are there any plans to address this issue?

Part of it is just a market issue, as long as the market is providing opportunities and salaries in terms of money and work at levels which are much higher than which is available. Students ask themselves, “If I do a PhD, then what?”. Whereas let’s say you are going to a software industry, you start with a large salary and the growth is reasonably good. That is the market situation as it is and there is very little you can do to change that unless the demands from the Indian Industry for PhDs and more qualified people increases enormously and that will only come about when Indian Industry will come with its own R&D to innovate and it is not doing that right now except in some areas like pharmaceuticals. You will find it very difficult as a PhD, as there are very limited opportunities available in the Indian industry for PhD in Materials Engineering. You will have to go into academics or one of the national laboratories but not into the industry. Therefore job opportunities are limited so this also drives people in other directions.

The US is working with solar cells, fuel cells, and other such areas because funding is more. How is the general development today, in classical metallurgy, which deals with alloys and metals?

Yeah, classical metallurgy is probably the second oldest profession in the world, in existence since the bronze age. Classical metallurgy - in terms of application - has reached a level of maturity. So, you need much more effort to bring in new concepts. So, the focus of classical metallurgy is more to do with cost reduction, improved efficiency, yield, and the science that drives all this. For example, in the jet engine, the early growth was very rapid; then it stabilises, as it becomes more difficult to improve something. Then people started asking about how to reduce cost, or improve the yield of a part… and there’s enormous science in that. You are applying science in a slightly different way to improve efficiency. That is where classical metallurgy is. You have to improve computational capability. Let me give you an example of this: that of a jet engine. When you want to design the airfoil of a jet engine, the fan blades you see when you look at the engine take about 3 weeks to design it aerodynamically. Developing a new material for the blade can take 10-15 years because we have worked more by trial and error. So there is an enormous effort to bring in a computational modelling and simulation effort into materials engineering to speed up the process of materials research. This is a major area in classical metallurgy. What also happened over the years is that we are able to manipulate things at very different scales in terms both of synthesis and processing. We can now move atoms around as opposed to making large ships, so the ability to characterise and manipulate the different length scales have opened up different possibilities. Whether it is solar photonics or microelectronics, all of this has emerged from our ability to manipulate at the scale of the order of a few atoms. So, the application of materials, and our ability to do that and characterise materials have broadened. There are new horizons of applications that have just come because of this, and so funding and research have tended to co-exist.

Classical metallurgy - in terms of application - has reached a level of maturity.

What do you see as the future of materials in the next decade or two, sir?

In terms of classical metals and alloys, there is a greater effort in computational methods such that you reduce the amount of experimental effort. You inform your research into processes and alloy development through better computational methods so that the time scale in developing new processes and new materials is reduced and also cost for high efficiencies is reduced. Another aspect is the ability to manipulate at various length scales. This has simply broadened the scope of applications.

What would you say are the key aspects to becoming a good researcher?

The combination of enormous curiosity, patience and discipline are the key attributes. There is an excitement to research in how you’re finding new things. Ultimately, it is the hard work that’s necessary, and it is hard in the sense that it is very difficult to define to someone not doing research. Researching involves hours and hours of work, either in front of the computer or in experiments, to get it right. A lot of patience and discipline is required, but that is compensated by the excitement you feel when you find something new; that drives the hard work and discipline. This combination of excitement and curiosity, coupled with the discipline to get this going, is what defines the attributes of a researcher. In television today, you have a ten-minute attention span, followed by ten minutes of advertisements; you can’t do research like that. Research should stay with you always, whether you are working, or at home, or sleeping or eating; the thought of what is new and what you are learning, should always be with you.

A lot of patience and discipline is required for research, but that is compensated by the excitement you feel when you find something new.