The K V Rao Scientific Society has chosen three students from the University of Hyderabad (UoH) for the 2013 Annual Research Awards. M Hanumantha Rao of the Advanced Centre for Research in High Energy materials (ACRHEM) working under Dr. K. Muralidharan, Pidishety Shankar of the School of Physics working under Dr. Nirmal K Viswanathan and Supratim Basak of the School of Chemistry working under Prof. Rajadurai Chandrasekar were given this honour at a function organized recently in the city. Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, VC, UoH was the Chief Guest and gave away the prizes.
M Hanumantha Rao
P. Shankar
Supratim Basak
While M Hanumantha Rao was given the award (winner in Chemistry-trophy and Rs:20,000/-) for the research paper entitled “Synthesis, Characterization and energetic properties of closo-(B12H12)-2 salts of imidazoleum derivatives“, Pidishety Shankar received the award (second runner-up in Physics-trophy and Rs:10,000/-) for his research on Polarimetric Investigation of Surface Plasmon Resonance and Applications and Supratim Basak received the award (first runner-up in Chemistry-trophy and Rs:10,000/-) for his research paper “Top down and bottom up approaches for the fabrication of functional molecular nano/micro structures“.
Dr. K.V. Rao Scientific Society was founded in 2001 by forming a corpus from the donations from friends and family of Dr. Rao. Dr. K.V. Rao retired as Superintendent Chemist, Geological Survey of India. The passion of Dr. Rao by taking part actively in promotion and encouragement of young scientists in pursuit of their research activities has been instrumental in bringing about this society. This organization is a non-profit one with the only interest in promoting science in whatever way it is possible. Towards this the Society was started in a small way in 2001 by awarding one young scientist for research the award. Over the years the numbers of awards as well as the number of activities of the society have increased so as to address more and more students at various levels of education right from schools to universities. Dr.Rao’s research contributions are many and are on various subjects. Most important of them was his work on fluoride bearing waters in Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat. The work related to incidence of fluorosis, defluoridation of waters by Serpentine (a naturally occurring mineral rejected as waste in asbestos mines), designing community defluoridation plants and portable family kits in fluorosis endemic villages. His defluoridation work influenced medical specialists to successfully use serpentine as a medicine for the treatment of human fluorosis for which no medicine was known till then.