Naba Dutta

Biography

I have been engaged in fundamental and applied research in the areas of Advanced Polymer Materials, Polymer Composites & Nanocomposites, Biomimetic Polymers, Biomaterials Engineering, Energy Materials for energy conversion devices including Fuel Cells, Thin Films & Coatings and Advanced Manufacturing for more than 25 years, after finishing my PhD (Polymer Science and Engineering in 1991 from Indian Institute of Technology, India). I have achieved distinction at the national and international level through original, innovative and distinguished contributions to scholarship, research and research supervision in the discipline of chemical science, materials engineering, and multidisciplinary research on complex interfaces. My research activities focused on both fundamental and industrial significance and now has established a research portfolio in highly interdisciplinary areas of Structured Polymer Materials, Polymer Interfaces and Nanomaterials' Science. I have taken the leading role to assemble many nationally competitive and internationally collaborative proposals (e.g. ARC-DP, ARC-LP, ARC-LIEF, SIEF, ARENA), and demonstrated capacity and vision to lead a diverse, innovative, and interdisciplinary research team. I have also been the team leader of many successful research projects supported by commercial companies with key role in the direction of the project, financial control, planning, liaison with the collaborator, supervision of staff/students, and deliver successful outcome.

Research Interest

 Demonstrated the power of directed self-organization/self-assembling of biomimetic polymers, block-copolymers to harnessed pre-organized templates for confined synthesis of noble metal nano and sub-nano particles, light harvesting nano-structures and functional nano-objects.  World class research in materials for renewable energy technology, which has the potential to be game changing in the enabling of critical energy technology.  Design and synthesis of supported Platinum and Platinum alloy nano & sub-nano particles- the most effective electrocatalyst for oxidation and reduction reactions for fuel cell using a aqueous media, mild conditions from sustainable resources.  Design of electrode materials, Pt/C heterostructure and membrane electrode assembly as gas diffusion electrodes for proton exchange membrane for fuel cells.  Development of novel ion selective membranes for energy conversion and energy storage devices  Pioneered research in the areas of amino acid sequence heuristics essential to encode phase behaviour in multifunctional intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) polymers and to design novel LCST or UCST-exhibiting protein polymers that consist of biologically-active peptide repeats;  Engineered bio-mimetic multi-responsive protein polymer with extraordinary responsiveness and exquisite functionality;  Set the foundation to predict and encode phase behaviour of IDPs at the sequence level and to identify at a proteome-level, proteins that might exhibit advanced multi-responsive behaviour.  Use of Australian Neutron scattering facility to probe both structures and dynamics of intrinsically disordered protein and other condensed matter- probe size range covers from the near Angstrom sizes to the near micron sizes.  Development novel method/protocol to precisely identify the interfacial interactions in a composite materials and in-depth understanding of the consequence of reinforcement  Generated fundamental knowledge in understanding of interfacial interaction and its consequences on elastomer/polymer reinforcement.  Fundamental understanding of the structure/property/performance and rheological behaviour of multicomponent soft materials and gels.  Long-term viscoelastic behaviour of thermo-rheologically complex materials and development of realistic constitutive equations that does not follow WLF type simple rules.