Arindam Banerjee
IACS, Kolkata
Arindam Banerjee received Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India in 1997. He joined as a lecturer in Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Calcutta (now Kolkata) in July, 1998 after a brief a post-doctoral research from Weizmmann Institute of Science, Israel. He became a full professor in 2009 December. He has published 183 research papers in various peer reviewed international journals and has supervised 27 Ph.D. candidates. His current research interest includes peptide based soft functional materials, gels in health care and environmental remediation, nanohybrids, nanoclusters and carbon nanodots. He is an Editorial Advisory Board member in Soft Matter, A RSC journal. He is a fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences (Bangalore) and also a Fellow, Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), U.K. (2014). He was the Director (Additional charge) IACS, Kolkata from 15th April 2024 – 19th March, 2025.
Session 1C: Lectures by Fellows/Associates
Chairperson: Vijayamohanan Pillai, IISER Tirupati, Tirupati
Self-associating peptides for sustainable development
In our modern society, sustainable development is an urgent need due to the removal of environmental pollution, tackle the energy crisis and fight against drug resistant bacteria. Peptide are very good candidates to be selfassembled by using various non-covalent interactions such as hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic interaction, pi-pi interactions, electrostatic interactions to form nanofibrillar network structure that can be able to entrap a lot of solvent molecules in suitable conditions to form hydrogels/organogels depending upon the situation. These peptide hydrogels have been used for slow and sustained release for biologically important molecules, anticancer and other drugs. The peptide based gelators can be also be used for three-dimensional cell cultures and potential anti-microbial agents. Our recent work demonstrated anti-cancer properties of peptide-based gelators. Apart from using the peptide based soft biomaterials in health care system, these soft functional materials have been amazingly used in environmental remediation: (1) removal of toxic organic dyes and (2) hazardous of metal ions $({\rm Pb}_2^+, {\rm Cd}_2^+)$ from contaminated waste-water, oil spill recovery, and even for capturing the harmful and obnoxious HCl gas. A recent study of our research group includes a successful and convincing demonstration of peptide-based Ag containing metallo-hydrogels as a nanocatalyst for water splitting to produce hydrogen as a green energy resource by a clean and sustainable method.