Creating Value with Chemistry
Creating Value with Chemistry
About
Creating value with chemistry
Prof. Dr. Soumyajit Roy, FRSC, FRSA, FICS, FAScT, CChem, is a materials scientist and chemist whose research explores how molecular organization, interfaces, and collective phenomena give rise to new functions in matter.
A Professor in the Department of Chemical Sciences at IISER Kolkata and Head of the EFAML Materials Science Center, his research traverses soft-oxometalates, polyoxometalates, supramolecular chemistry, soft matter, crystallization, microfabrication, electrocatalysis, carbon dioxide reduction, water oxidation, and sustainable energy conversion. At the heart of his work lies an enduring interest in connecting molecular-scale interactions with emergent behaviour and macroscopic function.
Prof. Roy's scientific approach deliberately crosses disciplinary boundaries, bringing together chemistry, materials science, physics, electrochemistry, and concepts from complexity and information. His research seeks not merely to create new materials, but to understand how matter organizes, transforms, stores information, and performs useful work.
Through fundamental discovery, international collaboration, mentorship, and scientific leadership, his broader vision is to develop new ways of thinking about materials while connecting fundamental science with some of the most important challenges in energy, environment, sustainability, and society.
Soumyajit serves on the editorial board of several international journals, viz., Journal of Materials and Engineering Materials, Frontiers in Chemistry, Frontiers in Fuels, Chemistry Africa, Materials Open. He has authored till date more than 120 research papers in premier journals like Nature Communications, Angewandte Chemie, Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Nanoletters, etc. He further holds several patents and has also authored more than 10 books including several in Bengali aimed at popularization of science in his mother tongue. Soumyajit is married to a Neuroscientist.
understanding formation of molecular crystals from the angle of soft-matter
Crystallization can be viewed as one of nature’s most elegant manifestations of symmetry breaking: a disordered, dynamically fluctuating state selects, through nucleation and growth, an ordered state possessing a particular spatial symmetry. Our work approaches crystallization from this soft-matter perspective, asking how fluctuations, intermolecular interactions, interfaces, solvent environments, and competing free-energy landscapes collectively determine the emergence of crystalline order.
Across our studies reported in Crystal Growth & Design (2018, 2026) and Cell Reports Physical Science (2026), we have explored how apparently subtle changes in the chemical or physical environment can redirect nucleation pathways, stabilize competing structures, and ultimately select a particular crystalline state. Rather than regarding crystallization simply as the assembly of molecules into a periodic lattice, we treat it as a dynamic transition from disorder to order, in which molecular correlations progressively emerge from a fluctuating medium.
This perspective connects classical crystallization with the broader physics of soft matter, phase transitions, and self-organization. Crystals thus become more than final structures: they are records of the symmetry-breaking pathways through which matter organizes itself, offering a window into how microscopic interactions generate macroscopic order.
Carbon dioxide Conversion to fuels
Soumyajit's research group over the last ten years have been developing the frameworks of sustainable solutions to convert carbon dioxide into fuels like alcohol (Ethyl alcohol) and acids (formic acid) and aldehydes (formaldehyde) etc. In this pursuit they have been developing SOM (soft-oxometalate) based pre-catalysts and of late N containing systems that shows possibilities of scaling. Bio-inspired artificial photosynthesis to achieve sustainable solutions is one of their research objectives. This avenue of research has led to publications of several high impact articles in top venues like Nature Communications, Angewandte Chemie, Journal of Materials Chemistry A, etc. The group actively collaborates with top research groups of Austria, Germany and P. R. China and the USA. The group further welcomes post-docs and talented MS students to pursue PhD in this direction of research. A schematic of an algorithmic CO2RR is shown in the artwork.