Meet Prof. Subhajit Bandyopadhyay, the IISER Kolkata chemist who mentored India's Chemistry Olympiad team to its best-ever finish this July. He studied at the University of Burdwan for his bachelor's, then IIT Kanpur for his master's, before earning his PhD under Prof. Reginald Mitchell at the University of Victoria in Canada. He went on to postdoc with Prof. Ron Breslow at Columbia University and spent a year at Cambridge under Prof. Florian Hollfelder before joining IISER Kolkata as an Assistant Professor. Since then, he's picked up 4 Best Teacher Awards from IISER Kolkata's own student community, become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and earned an Honorary Membership of the American Chemical Society. This July, as Head Mentor, he guided India's 4-student team through the 58th IChO in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. All 4 came home with gold. India tied for Rank 1 with China and Vietnam, its best result in 27 appearances at the competition. Mentor who spent 27 years building the platform his students needed just 5 days in Tashkent to stand on.
