Dr Amit Kumar

Dr Amit Kumar

UKRI Future Leaders Fellow

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 3411
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 a 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.  Amit started his independent academic career in Jan 2020 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the School of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews. Since Aug 2022 he is working as a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the areas of homogeneous catalysis, polymer chemistry, and circular economy.

Research areas

Catalysis plays a major role in the production of food, pharmaceuticals, and energy. Kumar Research Laboratory (KuRLa) is striving in the area of green homogeneous catalysis to contribute to a circular eocnomy. The lab is working on the development of new sustainable catalytic processes for the synthesis of renewable polymers and depolymerisation of plastic waste as well as for the transformation of CO2 to useful chemicals/materials. A significant effort is also being made towards the development of new chemical hydrogen storage materials, preferably a renewable liquid of high gravimetric storage capacity. For more information see the group website: https://kumarresearchlab.com/

PhD supervision

  • Garima -
  • Aayush Anand
  • Ted Brumsen
  • Chandrika Ghosh
  • Luming Guo
  • Alejandra Sophia Lozano Perez
  • James Luk
  • Benjamin Sole
  • Maja Wiezik

Selected publications

 

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