Gautam R. Desiraju

-:ABOUT THE AUTHOR:-

Gautam Desiraju has been in the Solid State and Structural

Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India since 2009, and since 2023, he has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor in UPES, Dehradun. Prior to this, he was in the University of Hyderabad for 30

years. He has played a major role in the development and growth of the subject of crystal engineering. He is noted for his role in the concept of weak hydrogen bonding gaining acceptance among chemists and crystallographers. His books on crystal engineering (Elsevier, 1989; World Scientific, 2011) and the weak hydrogen bond in structural chemistry and biology (OUP, 1999) are particularly well known. He is one of the most highly cited Indian scientists with more than 475 research papers, 80000+ citations and an h-index of 105. He has won international awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis, the TWAS award in Chemistry, and the ISA medal for Science of the University of Bologna. He has guided the Ph.D work of around 35 students and mentored around 70 post-doctoral associates. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of Chemical Communications and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He is a former president

of the International Union of Crystallography. He is a recipient of an honorary doctorate degree of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, Rayalaseema University, Kurnool and Gulbarga University, Kalaburagi. He was awarded the Acharya P.

C. Ray Medal (2015) of the University of Calcutta for innovation in science and technology.

His books Bhārat: India 2.0 and Delimitation and States Reorganization are outside the scientific domain and are concerned with the constitutional history of India and its re-imagination as Bhārat, a civilisational state rather than a nation-state as has been understood till now. Two books published in 2025 are India’s Supply Chains in a World at War and Fixing Science in India: A Socio-Economic Prescription. A scientific autobiography for the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (German Chemical Society) in their series Lebenswerke in der Chimie (Lives in Chemistry) will appear in 2026.