Research Group

Manzoor Ahmad Dar did masters in Physical Chemistry from University of Kashmir in 2010. He qualified National Eligibility Test for Junior Research Fellowship in 2010 and subsequently did his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Sourav Pal at CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. His PhD work involved understanding the structure, dynamics and catalytic activity of gold and silver nanoclusters using density functional theory and abinitio molecular dynamics based simulations. Soon after his PhD, he joined Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal as a postdoctoral fellow where he worked with Prof. Vardharajan Srinivasan in understanding methane activation on bare iron clusters and iron atoms trapped in silica matrix. He joined as an Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, IUST Awantipora in June 2018. His research focusses on data-driven approaches, including high-throughput first principles simulation based screening and machine learning for accelerating the discovery of stable single and double atom catalysts for energy conversion processes such as CO2RR and NRR while accounting for stability, aggregation resistance, and competitive reactions such as HER.