Brilliant Minds, Different Perspectives

Fall 2025
By Kayt Sukel

It had been 20 years since Paul Cherukuri ’08, Rice’s chief innovation officer, last set foot in India, the place of his birth. To say he found it much changed is a bit of an understatement.

“I was born in India. I went back every year as a child and spent quite a bit of time there,” he says. “But being there last year, I was struck by the remarkable growth all around me — so much opportunity and innovation. India has really become this incredible place where people are coming together to solve complex problems in very scalable ways.”

In November 2024, Cherukuri joined a delegation of prominent Rice researchers and campus leaders, including President Reginald DesRoches, to celebrate the formal launch of Rice Global India. This initiative is a new and distinctive chapter in Rice’s international plan, with a bold mission to develop strategic partnerships with India’s leading educational institutions and industry players. The partnership’s goal is to facilitate research, innovation and advanced educational exchange.
 

Centered in Bengaluru (Bangalore), an established technology and innovation hub often referred to as India’s “Silicon Valley,” the program builds on the success of existing partnerships between Rice and institutions like the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Establishing the Bengaluru hub in India was the next logical step to expand the university’s footprint — and support the kind of groundbreaking research and unsurpassed education with the power to better the world, says Caroline Levander ’95, Rice’s vice president for global strategy. Levander is charged with leading the development of new research collaborations and partnerships and academic programs that will increase Rice’s global impact.

“We started by focusing on Europe to raise the academic reputation of Rice and increase our visibility as an institution in other parts of the world. But going into India allows us to put a greater focus on innovation and accelerating research commercialization,” Levander says. “They have the students and the expertise that allow us to build many meaningful joint activities there.”
 

Elevating partnerships

For Rice faculty members who started their careers in India, the new hub will elevate existing relationships with colleagues in both academia and industry. Materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, a pioneer in nanotechnology, received his bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering in India. After completing his doctorate and joining the faculty at Rice, he continued to build strategic partnerships there to facilitate his research in nanomaterials. 

 Ajayan took a leading role in the founding of a joint IIT Kanpur-Rice Collaborative Center, focused on research in sustainable energy and materials.

“This was the first formal connection we made with India — and, in the last few years, we had almost 10 projects focused on energy and sustainability,” he explains. “With those successes, Rice became more interested in engaging more with India, which led to the establishment of Rice Global India and now an office in Bengaluru.”

One of Ajayan’s former postdoctoral fellows, Soumyabrata Roy, is now an assistant professor of sustainable energy engineering at IIT Kanpur. While still at Rice, Roy served as a co-principal investigator on one of the joint Rice-IITK projects on materials for sustainable energy applications. Today, he continues to pursue joint research efforts in the areas of sustainable energy and advanced materials. He believes the creation of Rice Global India significantly elevates the collaborative and translational potential both of his work and those of his collaborators at Rice.

“This program enables access to a wide spectrum of expertise and infrastructure across both institutions, which is particularly valuable for advancing our work on carbon capture, green hydrogen and sustainable chemical transformations,” he says. “We’ve been enabled to pursue jointly funded bilateral projects, collaboratively mentor students, and explore scalable, cross-border technological solutions.”

Lane Martin, director of the Rice Advanced Materials Institute, adds that this more formal extension of Rice’s footprint into India will allow researchers to create truly “symbiotic” partnerships to accelerate state-of-the-art research, helping to move it from the laboratory into the real world.
 

By working together, we can find new paths forward. By combining our funding and our work, we can create a powerful research ecosystem and multiply our potential impact.
 

“The faculty members in India that we partner with are interested in the same big problems we are trying to solve, but they approach them with a different point of view,” he says. “Our partners have great ideas, they are thinking about new ways to do things and they are bringing a depth of resources that are different than what we have in the U.S. By working together, we can find new paths forward. By combining our funding and our work, we can create a powerful research ecosystem and multiply our potential impact.”

As an example, Martin referenced some of the work he is doing with Bhagwati Prasad, an assistant professor of materials science at IISc. Prasad’s group takes a more “applied engineering” approach to microelectronics projects, he says.

“He’s looking at how we can make a new kind of logic or memory, working at this higher level,” Martin says. “And it’s not that I’m not interested in those things, but my group is really focused on the fundamental materials needed to enable those kinds of applications. By working together, we can get into the deep, deep details of a new material system with new and interesting functionality and get to a feasible solution faster.”
 

Science is ‘99% about the people’

Cherukuri says that the growing economy of India has created an emerging innovation infrastructure that supports the scaling up of developing technologies. This will allow Rice’s scientists and engineers to prototype and test their ideas more rapidly. But, by and large, he says the biggest draw of Rice Global India is the people.

Martin agrees. He says that good research is “99% about the people,” and the right partnerships are going to help labs both at Rice and in partnered institutions and companies make good progress faster.

“When you can have brilliant minds, with different skills, different experiences and perspectives, come together to work on hard problems, you can find innovative solutions to really complex problems quickly and figure out how to scale them,” Martin says. “It’s invaluable.”

The program will facilitate graduate student exchanges so those students have the opportunities to work and learn from different laboratory settings. It will, says Sreya Ghose, a principal adviser for Rice Global India, give both Rice and Indian students a unique opportunity to “work across borders.”

“Partners can pull from the existing talent within Rice and partner institutions,” she says. “It enables students to grow and learn through exposure to new technologies, new mentors and cultures as they work on different projects.”
 

Coming full circle

While Rice Global India is setting down roots, materials scientist Abhishek Singh, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science and chair of the Office of International Relations, says he sees both Rice and its strategic partners continuing to build more strength and capabilities, expanding into more fields. 

Singh also knows Rice well, having spent several years in Houston as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Rice materials scientist and nanoengineer Boris Yakobson. At IISc, he played a significant role in establishing the partnerships that led to the establishment of Rice Global India in Bengaluru. “That was a very proud moment for me personally and for IISc in general,” Singh says.  

“We are really excited about the student exchanges and the continued high-level facility research collaborations,” Singh adds. “And, as we build this groundwork, there are many more interested people. We need to think about how to engage them jointly so we can keep this wheel rolling.”  

Ghose says the initiative will continue to grow. “We have such great potential to scale, to build, and to tap into the ambition and aspirations that represent India,” she says. “We are being very deliberate about who we choose as our partners, focusing on those that can help us maintain our focus on entrepreneurship and innovation. But even as the program evolves, we want to ensure students have access to world-class talent and to the kind of research and industry infrastructure to deliver real results.”

Another critical aspect, says Roy, is the initiative’s focus on equity. By looking at how to benefit all partners, Rice Global India is redefining what global academic collaboration can look like, he says.

“It is not just about building international visibility — it’s about creating equitable, high-impact partnerships that draw on local strengths and global networks,” he explains. “This model prioritizes long-term collaboration over short-term visibility and values shared leadership, mutual benefit and deep academic integration.”

Last year’s visit to introduce the program in India resulted in a full circle moment for Cherukuri. His parents’ journey from India to the U.S. to pursue medical careers was transformative for him — and shaped who he is as both a scientist and a person. As he visited Bengaluru, as well as Hyderabad, the city where he spent his summers growing up, he was inspired by the educational ecosystems that can work toward a common mission: advancing innovation to develop solutions for a better world. That, he says, is the power of higher education and collaboration.

 

Last year’s visit to introduce the program in India resulted in a full circle moment for Cherukuri. His parents’ journey from India to the U.S. to pursue medical careers was transformative for him — and shaped who he is as both a scientist and a person.

 

Earlier this summer, Levander returned to Bengaluru and Hyderabad to continue building upon established partnerships and to lay the groundwork for new collaborations. With prime office space newly secured in Bengaluru’s IT corridor, Rice Global India stands to be deeply integrated into the city’s dynamic startup environment. “We’re within walking distance to Chevron’s new engineering and innovation center,” Levander says, noting that global giant InfoSys has a campus nearby. “With this space, we can convene many Rice communities — including academic, industry and alumni.”

“India is central to our efforts,” she said in an interview with the media network Times News Now. Already, there are active educational and research collaborations between Rice and faculty at IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras and IISc in Bengaluru — with more on the way. Levander adds, “We believe the future of education is cross-border, interdisciplinary and inclusive.”
 

Research Partnerships in Progress

Rice and partners at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Science are collaborating on funded research projects in critical areas such as energy and the environment, health care, biomedical sciences and more with the goal of creating academic and societal impact. Here are a few examples:

Rare Earth Mysteries
Geoscientists Rajdeep Dasgupta at Rice and Debajyoti Paul at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur are combining experimental and geochemical approaches to study the genesis of rare earth elements. These critical metals play an important role in renewable energy technologies (think wind turbines, electric cars and solar panels). Most of the world’s REEs come from carbonatite, a unique product of magma or lava. The teams gathered natural samples of carbonatite rocks in field sites in western India, then conducted experiments to answer questions about the conditions that lead rare earth elements to form in these rocks. 

Emergency Vision
When buildings collapse, emergency responders face enormous obstacles in identifying the location of individuals trapped under rubble or debris as quickly as possible. Rice electrical engineer Ashutosh Sabharwal and IIT Kanpur computer scientist Amitangshu Pal are collaborating to develop a radar-assisted rescue-aid system that will more accurately locate and direct assistance to individuals in such emergencies. While radars can see in the dark and through dust, they struggle to see when the signal bounces off too many objects, as is true in a debris field. The team is developing a suite of physics-grounded methods to “undo” the effect of multiple bounces from debris, aiming to achieve two goals simultaneously: finding if there is a living survivor by detecting their breathing and approximately localizing their position. The team has tested their innovations in a controlled experiment with people safely behind
thick walls or emulated debris. 

Fewer Injections + Better Vaccines
In this research collaboration, biophysicist Raghavan Varadarajan at the Indian Institute of Science and bioengineer Kevin McHugh at Rice are working to encapsulate Varadarajan’s thermostable COVID-19 vaccine in McHugh’s pulsatile-release vaccine delivery system to create a single-injection COVID-19 vaccine that enhances and prolongs protection against the disease without the need for frequent injections. “Our biodegradable particles release the vaccine in a pulse after a period of time that we determine,” McHugh says. The hope is for such a system to be adapted broadly for many vaccines, thus overcoming barriers to vaccine accessibility and lowering health care costs globally. 

Fire Up the 3D Printer
3D printing of food is an emerging manufacturing technique that has opened new avenues for advancements in personalized nutrition, texture and taste. However, current 3D food printing research is often limited to trying new compositions and printing techniques without a deep understanding of food rheology (the study of deformation and flow of food when force is applied). Chemical engineer Yogesh Joshi at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Rice mechanical engineer Daniel Preston aim to characterize the rheological properties of an array of food inks suitable for 3D food printing, along with the resultant food structure and mechanics. The goal is to achieve edible metamaterials with enhanced and tunable food properties unattainable through conventional food manufacturing methods.