Chemistry

Camps for students

The NIUS chemistry programme for students starts every December. The thrust of the first camp i.e., exposure cum enrichment camp is to present vibrant academic experience about chemistry. The experimental sessions at the camps provide opportunities to reflect about procedural steps, data analysis and evaluation, and possible sources of errors for the given experimental procedure. The theoretical sessions covering some of the core areas are aimed at presenting perspectives about conceptual understanding in the given domain and applications of fundamental concepts in different situations. These camps also cover theoretical sessions related to frontier areas of chemistry. The workshops at the camp engage students with comprehension of scientific literature, abstract writing and planning and designing of experiments. Additionally, efforts are made to cover sessions on historical aspects of chemistry and gender issues. At the end of the first camp, students are selected for projects to be done in subsequent vacations. The project work is done either at HBCSE chemistry laboratories or at other scientific institutions of the respective mentors.   

Some of the representative project areas in chemistry are-

Organic Chemistry: Synthesis of compounds through green pathways like using catalysts, different energy sources, solvent free reactions, deep eutectic solvents, development of experiments for undergraduate chemistry laboratories.

Physical/Interfacial Chemistry: synthesis of metal oxides/sulphides, characterization and electrochemical studies, study of physico–chemical properties of surfactant containing systems (phase diagrams, equilibria of azo dye indicators in micellar systems, cmc measurements, and effect of additives), etc.

Computational/Quantum chemistry: Monte-Carlo simulations of polymers at surfaces, thermal properties of nuclear materials, simulations of liquids, etc.

Camps for teachers

In addition to NIUS camps for students, we also conduct workshops for teachers teaching chemistry at undergraduate level. This is relatively a new dimension to the NIUS programme. The thrust of these workshops is currently on experimental domain and some of the research informed alternative ways to design experiments for undergraduate laboratories. Another thrust area is variety of problems and their role for assessment in chemistry.

NIUS- Teacher Development Camps/Workshops