Ayyappanpillai Ajayaghosh
Subsequently, working under the guidance of Prof. V. N. Rajasekharan Pillai, he secured a Ph.D. from University of Calicut in 1989; his thesis was on Solid-Phase Peptide Synthesis.
[9] His career started in 1988 at the Regional Research Laboratory, presently the National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (NIIST), of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, as a Scientist and held various positions before promoting to an Outstanding Scientist (Scientist-H)[10] and the head of the Photosciences and Photonics Group of NIIST.
Subsequently he became the head of the Chemical Sciences and Technology group[11] He was the director of the Institute from 2015 and held the additional responsibility as the Dean of Chemical Sciences, Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR) New Delhi.
[1] In between, he was as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Strahlen Chemie, Germany during 1994–96.
[12] He served as an adjunct professor of Material Science Programme at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
[10] Presently, he is a J. C. Bose National Fellow at CSIR-NIIST and an adjunct professor at IISER Thiruvananthapuram.
Ajayaghosh is married to Ambili, and together they have two children, one of whom is Anantharaman Ajay, known for his roles in the 2023 movie "Romancham", Gaganachari, and the YouTube channel "Appooppan and the Boys."
The family resides in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala..[10] Ajayaghosh's research have been principally in the fields of supramolecular chemistry, chemosensors, low band-gap polymers, fluorescent gels, organic nanostructures, and photoresponsive systems[13] and he is reported to have done extensive researches on supramolecular architecture and light-induced sensor systems.
[8] His work assisted in the design of larger molecular structures using self-assembling molecules and demonstrated ways to control their electrical conductivity through controlling external factors like temperature which have reported use in applications involving light harvesting, sensing, imaging, and security.
He was the first scientist to design functional Phenylenevinylene-based Organogels from designed building blocks, which has been detailed in his article, First Phenylenevinylene Based Organogels: Self-Assembled Nanostructures via Cooperative Hydrogen Bonding and π-Stacking, published in 2001.
[14] One of the commercial applications of his research is secret writing, thermally writable, non-copyable, and erasable fluorescent images useful for secret documentation by using a fluorescent gelator entrapped in a polystyrene film and the process has been developed by his team.
INSA Young Scientist Medal (1991), by the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi.
Sri Vidyadhiraja Samskrithi Puraskaram 2013 by Panmana Ashram, Quilon, Kerala.
TWAS Chemistry Prize 2013 by The World Academy of Sciences, Trieste, Italy.
ISAS National Award for Excellence in Science and Technology 2014 by Indian Society of Analytical Scientists.
Certificate of Merit (1987) from the Indian Chemical Society for the best paper presentation, at the Convention of Chemists, 1987 2.
Special Award and Citation (1988) of the Syndicate of Calicut University, Kerala, India for outstanding research contributions during 1985-1988 3.
