Georgia Institute of TechnologyGraduate Students and Faculty in the lab

Pratapkumar Nagarajan

Pratapkumar Nagarajan

Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Pratapkumar Nagarajan has always been interested in engineering. "I was very much interested in the manufacturing side of mechanical engineering," says Nagarajan, a native of India who earned his bachelor's degree in science and engineering at the National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, India, in 2001.

He made the switch from mechanical engineering to polymer microprocessing at Oakland University in Michigan, where he met his mentor, Dr. Donggang Yao, now a Georgia Tech assistant professor. "I was impressed by Dr. Yao. The microfabrication work of Dr. Yao was extremely fascinating to me," says Nagarajan, who came to the United States in search of better research prospects and the chance to work with the latest technologies. After earning his M.S. degree in mechanical engineering in 2003 under Yao, Nagarajan broadened his research to include the microfabrication of polymeric devices. When Yao moved to Georgia Tech's School of Polymer, Textile & Fiber Engineering in 2005, Nagarajan followed him.

Since joining Georgia Tech, he has further broadened the scope of his research. "I became interested in a couple of new things after coming to Georgia Tech," says Nagarajan, whose interests now include substituting metals used in optical waveguides with polymers and developing novel processing techniques for micro-texturing of thin films and patterning biomimetic structures. Nagarajan, whose research has appeared in several journals and conference publications, plans on continuing his career in industry research and development, focusing on replacing silicon and metals in electronic devices with polymers, and on developing new polymer microprocessing techniques for large-area replication.

"I picked the topic of biomimetics because nature's engineering of structures is truly fascinating," says Nagarajan, who seeks to replicate the same types of surface patterns found in nature to polymeric surfaces for more cost-effective commercial products. "Nature has a profound influence on engineering."