Dr Debabrata Maiti, a professor of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, has been awarded the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize — the Indian national award for excellence in scientific research — for Chemical Sciences for the year 2022. He was chosen for this honour for his outstanding contributions to the development of transition metal catalysis for the transformation of organic molecules to prepare value-added materials by site-selective functionalization, an area of research that has a major impact on the agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals industries.
Dr Maiti has shared the SSB prize with Dr Akkattu T Biju of IISc Bangalore.
Dr Maiti earned a BSc in chemistry from the University of Calcutta in 2001, an MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2003, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, USA, in 2008. He worked with Stephen L Buchwald for two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a post-doctoral fellow. He returned to India in 2010 and began working as an assistant professor of chemistry at IIT Bombay, where he is now a professor of chemistry.
Dr Maiti focuses on engineering chemical reactions to yield pharmaceutically and industrially valuable chemicals that would otherwise be difficult to access. His goal as a synthetic chemist is to create new, more difficult-to-access chemicals from readily available precursors. This is usually achieved by employing multistep, cost-effective processes. His intention is to reduce this process to a single step. The concept of ‘valorization’, which is essential to creating pharmaceutically and industrially valuable compounds from seemingly insignificant molecules, has been applied in Dr Maiti’s work.
Dr Maiti claims that he draws inspiration from nature and uses a variety of instruments, such as enzymes that are frequently unavailable in traditional chemistry for selective molecular framework modification and engineered metal-ligand complexes, which are complexes in which a molecule or ion is attached to a metal by chemical bonding.
There are a lot of carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds in organic molecules. If it were possible to modify the C–H bonds into new chemical bonds, the process of creating new molecules would be much easier and less expensive.
Catalysis, a process in which substances that remain unchanged at the end of the reaction influence the reaction, is the mechanism by which Dr Maiti and his team have developed reactions. A reaction’s path can be altered by catalysis, which also makes it easier to access in far simpler and milder circumstances.
In one of his most recent projects, Dr Maiti and group created a chemical reaction that defies logic in order to streamline the synthesis of compounds with significant biological roles. Unreactive C–H bonds are activated by the reaction to create necessary compounds known as lactones, which are present in both pharmaceuticals and natural products.
The C–H bonds are difficult to edit. Dr Maiti clarified that he does not wish to simultaneously activate every C-H bond in the molecules because that would be impractical. Selectivity is another issue that arises when a molecule has several similar C-H bonds and only one needs to be activated. His group has primarily concentrated on the design of ligands and the discovery of new organometallic catalysts in order to achieve selectivity.
It is still early to tell whether C-H activation will result in a cost-effective and long-lasting chemical transformation. The procedures developed by Dr Maiti’s group make it easier to produce vital commodities, agrochemicals, and life-saving drugs.
The IIT Bombay team led by Dr Maiti is developing catalysts to change organic molecules into materials, drug molecules, and natural products in an atom-economic manner. These conceptual advancements have had a big impact on the pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and materials research industries.
The group has been collaborating closely with research-oriented businesses to develop new materials, agrochemicals, and drugs. In light of this recent discovery, Tokyo Chemical Industry is selling ‘Maiti-Bag Auxiliary’ and Sigma-Aldrich’s ‘Maiti-Bera-Modak Auxiliary’ in the commercial market.
Earthquake-Resistant Building Techniques
The research team of Dr Maiti has been focusing on three facets of seismically-resistant infrastructure. The creation of energy-absorbing technology is one of those facets. Using materials that are readily available in the area, they have created three distinct varieties of these devices, also known as structural fuses. The aim is to make them easily accessible and economical.
The use of cutting-edge materials for seismically resilient infrastructure and innovative seismic design techniques are the other facets of their work. The team has also suggested a performance-based plastic design approach that gives architects the freedom to more easily and quickly design a new structure for a desired seismic intensity level. It also enables them to decide how much it will cost and how long it will take to upgrade currently standing structures that are seismically unsafe.
These energy-absorbing devices were created to solve an issue with metallic materials, like steel and aluminium, which have a tendency to buckle under compression loading and become useless at withstanding seismic loads. The goal of structural fuses is to maximise the energy-absorbing capacity while limiting such buckling. These devices can be installed diagonally between member joints, partially filling a panel, or directly below a building’s beams, depending on the site’s limitations.
Dr Maiti’s team has developed three different types of structural fuses. To determine which of these works best under earthquake loading, they have tested prototypes and applied them to building frames. These devices are not only highly efficient and reasonably priced, but they can be produced and installed on-site. Novel smart materials that are accessible in India have been incorporated into a few of these devices.
Making structures usable during and after an earthquake event is one of the goals of seismically resilient construction. After an earthquake, structures frequently show deformation, which causes some damage and tilts the structure. In terms of safety, this damage might not be significant, but no one would occupy a structure that is tilted. Dr Maiti’s team has created self-centring structural systems that use intelligent materials with the right amount of strength, deformability, and re-centering properties to return them to their initial position. These materials have undergone mechanical testing and had their earthquake-resistant qualities measured in a lab setting.
The primary basis for the earthquake-resistant design approach currently in use is the lateral force that a building would be subjected to. This technique is predicated on the idea that by guaranteeing specified detailing, a force-based approach should offer sufficient safety against structural collapse. However, a number of previous earthquakes have demonstrated that this kind of design may not be sufficient to ensure the safety and functionality of significant structures, like hospitals.
However, Dr Maiti’s research group’s performance-based design method offers comprehensive data on the most vulnerable components that need more care, the degree of safety for a given earthquake intensity, and the highest seismic impact that the structure can withstand while it is still in the design phase.
His research also encompasses cold-formed steel structures, steel structures without columns, composite hybrid columns, high-strength steel, and sophisticated seismic testing techniques. Dr Maiti and his colleagues have so far submitted six patent applications for passive vibration control systems.
