Thalappil Pradeep - Biography#

Thalappil Pradeep is the second Institute Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai, India. He is the Deepak Parekh Institute Chair Professor and is also a Professor of Chemistry. He studied at the University of Calicut, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), UC Berkeley, and Purdue. His research interests are in molecular and nanoscale materials. He is an author of over 550 scientific papers in journals and is an inventor of over 120 patents or patent applications. He is involved in the development of affordable technologies for drinking water purification and some of them have been commercialized. His pesticide removal technology has reached about 12 million people. His arsenic removal technology, approved for national implementation, is delivering arsenic free water to about 1.3 million people every day. He is a co-founder of seven companies. He is the recipient of several significant awards such as the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Prize, BM Birla Science Prize, JC Bose National Fellowship, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) prize in Chemistry, Padma Shri, Nikkei Asia Prize, Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water, VinFuture Prize, ENI award and the International Excellence Award of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany with the Fellowship of Schroff Foundation. He is a Fellow of all the science and engineering academies of India, TWAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science and The African Academy of Sciences. He has authored or edited ten books. He is on the editorial boards of several journals such as ACS Nano, Chemistry of Materials, Analytical Chemistry, Chemical Communications, Nanoscale, Environmental Science & Technology, JPC Letters, etc. He has authored popular science books in English and Malayalam and is a recipient of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for knowledge literature. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Research Award of IITM and Distinguished Alumnus Award of IISc. As part of philanthropy, he supports a school in his village where 500 students are on rolls.