Hello, and welcome to my homepage!

I am a mechanical engineer turned computational materials scientist with experience in modelling phase transformations and deformation induced microstructure evolution. I am currently part of the Microstructure and Stresses group at Institut Jean Lamour, Nancy (France) as a CNRS postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Benoit Appolaire and Prof. Maeva Cottura. Here, I am trying to use the “sharp” phase field model for simulating the nuances of discontinuous precipitation.

Prior to this, I did a postdoc with Prof. Conrard Feugmo at the Feugmo research group in the department of Chemistry at University of Waterloo. Here, we tried to modify a phase field crystal model by incorporating three-point correlation functions for complex crystal structures in order to study defect interactions in complex concentrated alloys.

Before coming to Canada, I completed my PhD from the department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, with Prof. M P Gururajan and Prof. Prita Pant. My PhD thesis focused on the study of the effect of dislocations on phase transformation phenomena using phase field simulations. Essentially, we study the effect of elastic interaction between dislocations and the solutes in a two-phase system leading to interesting phase transformation phenomena.

We have also used the phase field dislocation dynamics (PFDD) code developed to look at the equilibrium stacking fault widths in different face-centered cubic alloy systems. The generalised stacking fault energy is incorporated from atomistic or density functional theory calculations performed by our collaborators at Prof. Vaishali Shah’s group in University of Pune. In addition, during the early years of my PhD, I was also part of an ab-initio study of the effect of electron-phonon interactions on the total energy and hence, the stability of group-IV semiconductor polymorphs, such as Si and C.

As part of an Overseas visiting doctoral fellowship (SERB-OVDF 2019), I have also spent six months at GPM2-SIMaP, Universite Grenoble Alpes with Prof. Marc Fivel’s research group. During this fellowship, I worked on an in-house discrete dislocation dynamics simulation package called NUMODIS, trying to develop an algorithm to model slip transfer. This was followed by another effort in collaboration with the same team to implement fast Fourier transform based elastic stress computations in NUMODIS (the Discrete-Continuous Method).

At this website, you will find details about my projects, links to my publications, blog entries (in English and Malayalam (with translations)) and a brief CV. Thanks for visiting and hope you enjoy your time here!