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School of Chemistry > People > Dr Amit Kumar

Dr Amit Kumar

Dr Amit Kumar

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 463859
Email
ak336@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

Amit completed his Integrated M.Sc. Chemistry (2007-2012) from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal for academic excellence and won several fellowships/research awards by DAAD, IIT-ParisTech, KVPY and INSPIRE (Govt of India) and Indian Academy of Science.  He then won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship for his DPhil research at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). During his DPhil (2012-2016) he worked under the guidance of Prof. Andrew Weller in the area of synthetic organometallic chemistry and developed rhodium and iridium catalysts for the dehydrocoupling of amine-boranes. After completing his DPhil studies, Dr. Kumar was awarded the PBC (Planning and Budgeting Committee, Israel, 2016-2019) fellowship to work with Prof. David Milstein at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel where he was promoted to be the Senior Postdoc Fellow in 2019. In the Milstein research group Dr. Kumar  developed new pincer catalysts for small molecule activation and for the development of green and sustainable homogeneous catalysis based on dehydrogenation and hydrogenation reactions. Amit was awarded the FGS (Feinberg Graduate School) Prize for the outstanding achievements in postdoctoral research 2018 by the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Dr. Amit Kumar is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career fellow at the School of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews where he is working on the development of green catalytic reactions and hydrogen storage materials.

Research areas

Catalysis plays a major role in the production of food, pharmaceuticals and energy. Kumar Resarch Laboratory (KuRLa) is striving in the area of green homogeneous catalysis. The lab is focussed to develop new environmentally-benign and sustainable catalytic processes for the production of industrially useful chemicals from the cheap and inexpensive starting materials using pincer complexes. A significant effort is also being made to develop new chemical hydrogen storgae materials, preferrably liquid of high gravimetric storage capacity for which both dehydrogenation and hydrogenation (of the spent fuel) processes are facile.
For more information see the group website: https://kumarresearchlab.com/

Selected publications

 

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