Division of Physical and Mathematical Sciences – Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics
Date & Time: 27th November 2025 at 4pm
Venue: Faculty Hall, Main Building, IISc
Prof. Govindan Rangarajan, Director, IISc will preside
Abstract:
In this talk I trace the timeline of my research at IISc and discuss how circumstances, accidents and constraints shaped this journey – with a balance (hopefully) of breadth and depth.
In 2010, I established the Flexible Electronics Lab with the focus on developing new technologies for smart surfaces. However, many constraints (and constructions) led to my beginning this journey with the development of self-healing circuits. This work and some accidents led to interesting ideas that shaped a technology in wastewater treatment which led to the startup Openwater.in. When we finally got down to making thin film transistors (the building block of flexible electronics), we were well behind the state of art. The lab saw this as an opportunity to invent new devices and circuit techniques which added a new dimension to the community. I will discuss three such inventions – the Adaptive Dielectric Thin Film Transistor, the Speckled Gate Thin Film Transistor and Tunable Threshold Thin Film Transistor. I will conclude the talk with more recent ideas on Digestible Electronics and my future plans.
As you see, my research has been All Over the Place.
About the speaker:
Prof. Sanjiv Sambandan is currently a Professor at the Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics, the Department of Electronics Systems Engineering and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Water Research. From 2016 to 2022 he was jointly appointed at the Indian Institute of Science and the University of Cambridge as an Associate Professor via the DBT Lectureship and an Exceptional Talent Endorsement from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Prior to academic appointments he worked at the Electronic Materials and Device Lab, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), USA where he won the Golden Acorn Award and the PARC Special Recognition Prize. He obtained his PhD from the University of Waterloo in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a BTech in Electrical Engineering (Energy Systems) from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur where he won the Institute Proficiency Prize. He is also the founder of Openwater.in, a startup in the sustainability space.
ALL ARE WELCOME