Debabrata Goswami FRSC FInstP

Professor, Department of Chemistry and Center for Lasers and Photonics, IIT Kanpur

Debabrata Goswami FRSC FInstP

Present Positions

  • Professor (HAG), Department of Chemistry, IIT Kanpur
  • Faculty, Center for Lasers and Photonics (CELP), IIT Kanpur
  • Visiting Professor, Center for Bits and Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (since October 2025), as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow

Previous Positions

  • Dr. S. Sampath Chair Professor, IIT Kanpur (2018–2021)
  • Faculty, Department of Physics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (1998–2004)
  • Director of Laser Laboratories, Center for Laser Technology, Princeton University (1998)
  • Senior Scientist, R&D Division, Excel-Quantronix, New York (1997)
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Brookhaven National Laboratory (1996) and Harvard University (1995)

Education

Biography

Debabrata Goswami is Professor (Higher Administrative Grade) in The Department of Chemistry and The Center for Lasers & Photonics (CELP) at IIT Kanpur. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Prof. Goswami attended Princeton University, USA with multiple scholarships for his PhD (1994) where his thesis was Adjudged Excellent and won the HST fellowship. This was followed by PDFs at Harvard University (1995) and Brookhaven National Lab (1996). He was a Senior Scientist in the R&D Division of Excel-Quantronix, New York (1997) and subsequently the Director of Laser Laboratories at the Center for Laser Technology, Princeton University (1998). He returned to India at the end of 1998, to join the Physics Faculty of TIFR Mumbai. In 2004, he joined IIT Kanpur to also focus on pedagogy. Over the years, he has also been invited to several reputed Institutes worldwide as a visiting Professor, most recently at the Center for Bits and Atoms of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow (October 2025 to July 2026), and earlier at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iceland (2023). His research work spans across several interdisciplinary frontiers of science and engineering. Specifically, he is an ultrafast laser spectroscopist who has pioneered the use of coherent control with femtosecond pulse shaping in spatiotemporal control, quantum computing, microscopy, etc. He has received several academic & research accolades, some of which are the Hoechst Advanced Technology Division Industrial Affiliates Fellowship for outstanding academic record in Princeton, the International Senior Research Fellowship award of the Wellcome Trust (UK, 2004–2010), the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology (Govt. of India, 2005–2010), Thathachary Science Award (India), and the 2018 Galileo Galilei Award of the International Commission for Optics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2015), the Institute of Physics (2018), Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America, 2017), and the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE, 2019). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and is on the board as a life member for several affiliate Indian societies. He has published over two hundred research articles, several book chapters, edited conference proceedings and books. He has been Editor-in-Chief of PeerJ Analytical Chemistry since 2022, Associate Editor of Science Advances (2020–2025), Academic Editor of PLOS One, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (2024–2026), and Editor-in-charge of the Journal of Spectroscopy and Dynamics. He chaired the Instrument Science and Technology Group of the Institute of Physics (2020–2024), is a member of the Faraday Community Council for Physical Chemistry of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and has served on the Scientific Panel on Sampling and Analysis of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. He is an ardent supporter of Science Education and has been a popular K12 teacher with TopperLearning. He is on the global faculty of the Fab Academy, which champions the worldwide spread of hands-on Fab-lab education, where he teaches laser technologies in the computer-controlled cutting sessions.

Visiting Positions and Fellowships

Invited Lectures in the United States

  • 27 May 2026: “Ultrafast Science with Shaped Light: Seeing and Steering Matter and Interactions in Real Time”, JILA, University of Colorado Boulder, hosted by Prof. Henry Kapteyn.
  • November 2025: Lecture at Brown University, Providence, with Sonaly Goswami.
  • 10 August 2023: Seminar at Purdue University, Birck Nanotechnology Center, West Lafayette.
  • 26 June 2023: “Harnessing ‘shaped’ light for understanding biological applications at the molecular length scale”, Biological Physics (iPoLS) seminar, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
  • May 2010: Invited talk, “Femtosecond Spatiotemporal Control with Multiple Knobs” (JThF1), CLEO/QELS 2010, San Jose.

Patents

  • M. Sinha and D. Goswami, “System and Method for Improved Coherent Pulsed Communication System Having Spectrally Shaped Pulses”, US 7,587,143 (2009).
  • D. Goswami, S. Ashtekar and A. Nag, “Optical Enhancement of Two-Photon Absorption Process”, Indian patent application 2008DE00704 (filed 19 March 2008).

Courses and Outreach

Ultrafast Laser Virtual Lab

Under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication and Technology (NMEICT) initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India, in 2013, Prof. Goswami set up the Ultrafast Laser Virtual Lab hosted at IIT Kanpur. The Virtual Laboratory is an interactive environment for creating and conducting simulated experiments: a playground for experimentation. It consists of simulated laser characteristics: their interaction with medium in experimental units called the “modules” that encompass data files, interactive tools etc.

Quantum Computing Course

As part of his commitment to pedagogy initiatives, Prof. Goswami teaches a graduate level, twelve week course on Quantum Computing under the NPTEL initiative, presently being run on the Swayam platform. He conceived the course as an IIT Kanpur open elective and has taught it eight times; the NPTEL version (course 104104082) ran from July to October 2019 as noc19_cy31, and it is an All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) approved faculty development program course as well.

Listed on his IIT Kanpur page:

  • “Quantum computing”, Directions (IIT Kanpur), June 2004.
  • “Computing with dancing molecules”, Directions, February 2005.
  • “Ultrafast pulse shaping: Applications in microscopy, molecular control and computing”, Directions, Reach Symposium issue, 2007.
  • “Nonlinear optics with water”, Directions, Water issue, 2012.
  • Four articles in Kiran, the Indian Laser Association bulletin, 2007–2010.
  • “Optical Computing & Indian R&D” (March 2002) and “Two Nanotechnology Conferences in India” (August 2006), ATIP reports.

Publications

Visit the FemtoLab Publications page for abstracts and full-texts, or the FemtoLab Research page for more contextual publication lists. Since the publications of Prof. Goswami are equivalent to the Femto Lab publications, an interactive co-author network is presented instead. Nodes are sized by number of joint publications and colored by recency of collaboration (blue for earlier, coral for recent). Hover over a node to see details; drag nodes to rearrange; scroll to zoom.

Show the co-author network