Our Faculty

Dr. Dhamodaran Santhanagopalan is Professor at Amrita Center for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine. Before joining the center, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion, University of California, San Diego, for three years. Prior to postdoctoral work, he was a faculty at Physics Department, IIT Kanpur, for about three and a half years. Dr. Dhamodharan received PhD from University of Hyderabad, and M.Phil. and M.Sc degrees in Physics from Pondicherry University. During his postdoctoral work he was part of the Energy Frontier Research Centre led by Stony Brook University, funded by US Department of Energy. During this tenure, he was also a Guest researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Washington. As a part of this work, he established for the first time, fabrication of electrochemically active solid-state nano-batteries using focused ion beams. This significant contribution enabled in situ galvanostatic biasing of nano-batteries in the TEM to investigate interface effects, a bottle-neck in energy storage devices. During his tenure at IIT Kanpur, he developed several ion beam facilities and a GaN growth facility for high quality nanostructures with novel morphologies that are useful for opto-electronic applications. Two of the GaN nanostructure images were published as journal cover pages in Materials Today (2011) and Nano Today (2012). He has over 50 peer reviewed journal publications and 10 proceedings to his credit. He has been invited as a speaker in several national and international conferences. He is also an active reviewer for several international journals on topics related to his research interests. In the recent past, he has worked on micro/nano-fabrication and semiconductor nano-materials. Dr. Dhamodharan is currently focusing on energy storage technologies such as, lithium ion batteries, all-solid-state batteries and supercapacitors. The goal is to significantly improve both energy and power densities without compromising safety and cycling stability.