Water: How well do we know H2O?

Speaker: Prof. Charusita Chakravarty, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Abstract :

Water shapes life as we know it, from the aqueous environment of the living cell to many aspects of terrestrial climate. Despite its familiarity, there are many aspects of the physics and chemistry of water that are not well-understood and form the subject of current research. In the past couple of decades, experiments as well as theory have explored our understanding of water at different length scales, starting from small clusters, to the anomalous properties of bulk water and the role of water in the self-assembly of biomolecules into functional nanoscale structures. Starting with some basic concepts of physical chemistry, this talk will discuss some of these experiments on water and its role in biological and environmental contexts.

About the Speaker :

Dr. Chakravarty obtained her Ph. D. degree in theoretical chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1990. She subsequently did her postdoctoral research in Santa Barbara, Delhi and Cambridge and has been a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at I.I.T.-Delhi since 1994. Her research is in the area of physical and computational chemistry, with strong interdisciplinary interests in materials science, physics and chemical engineering. She is interested in using computer simulation techniques for molecular systems to understand the relationships between thermodynamic and transport properties of liquids, including anomalous behaviour of water, and the collective re-organization of atoms associated with phase transitions and nanoscale self-assembly. Some of her most recent work is on using structural estimators for the entropy to understand structure-property relationships of liquids, which may be translated in general terms as an effort to translate the qualitative insight “entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder” into quantitative measures for molecular systems. She enjoys teaching physical chemistry, specially quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. She is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and has received the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar award (2009), the Stree Shakti Science Samman (2009), B. M. Birla Science award (1999) and the INSA Medal for Young Scientists (1996).