Dr. Indrajit Maity – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Indrajit Maity

University of Freiburg
Organic Chemistry

Internal Junior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
July 2020 – January 2021

E-Mail: stefan.tilg@altphil.uni-freiburg.de

Last Update: 31.08.2021

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Indrajit Maity obtained his Ph. D. degree in Chemistry from Indian Institute of Technology Indore (IIT Indore) in 2015 and thereafter he moved to Ben-Gurion University of Negev, Israel for his postdoctoral study. He has joined at Prof Andreas Walther Lab at university of Freiburg in early 2019 after a long-term postdoctoral stay (2015-2019) at Prof. Gonen Ashkenasy Lab in Israel.

He has received several awards in his career including National scholarship in India, Junior Research Fellowship (CSIR-JRF) and Senior Research Fellowship (CSIR-SRF) in the subject of Chemical Science granted by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi, India. In 2015, he won the prestigious PBC Postdoctoral fellowship in the subject of chemical science granted by the Planning and Budgeting Committee (PBC) of the Council for Higher Education, in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance, Israel. In 2020, he was awarded with seal of excellence in Marie Curie IF proposal with a high score as 91.2. In the academic year 2020-21, he is a Marie S. Curie FRIAS COFUND Fellow at FRIAS, supported by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

He is a synthetic organic chemist with ten years of research experience in the area of supramolecular systems chemistry, physical organic chemistry, material science and nanoscience. His research interests focus on broad range of topics from supramolecular self-assembly to systems chemistry including dissipative system, self-replication, complex reaction networks, non-linear phenomena such as bistability, oscillating reaction networks at out of equilibrium, communicating networks. Currently, he is working on Feedback controlled enzymatic reaction networks, Smart materials under out of equilibrium and molecular machines.

Selected Publications

I. Maity, N. Wagner, R. Mukherjee, D. Dev, E. Peacock-Lopez, R. Cohen-Luria and G. Ashkenasy*, A Chemically Fueled Non-Enzymatic Bistable Network. Nat Commun. 2019, 10, 4636.
A. K. Das,* I. Maity, H. S. Parmar, T. O. McDonald and M. Konda, Lipase catalyzed dissipative self-assembly of a thixotropic peptide bolaamphiphile hydrogel for human umbilical cord stem cells proliferation. Biomacromolecule, 2015, 16, 1157.
I. Maity, H. S. Parmar, D. B. Rasale and A. K. Das*, Self-programmed nanovesicle to nanofiber transformation of a dipeptide appended bolaamphiphile and its dose dependent cytotoxic behavior. J. Mater. Chem. B, 2014, 2, 527
D. B. Rasale, I. Maity and A. K Das *, In situ generation of redox active peptides driven by selenoester mediated native chemical ligation. Chem. Commun., 2014, 50, 11397
I. Maity, D. B. Rasale and A. K. Das*, Sonication induced peptide-appended bolaamphiphile hydrogels for in situ generation and catalytic activity of Pt nanoparticles. Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 5301 (Top 10 most-read Soft Matter articles in April 2012.)

FRIAS Project

Molecular Robotics to Actuate Mesoscopic and Macroscopic Functions

One of the central challenges is to amplify the function of molecular machines into mesoscopic and macroscopic dimension to create work. At best this requires organizing the machines so as to be able to harness their motion with a directionality. In this context, molecular self-assembly is one of the key steps.Many natural self-assembly processes are energetically up-hill whereas, synthetic self-assembly processes are thermodynamically controlled and down-hill. Therefore, one of the present challenges in supramolecular chemistry is to achieve full control over the assembly behaviour also out of equilibrium – in particular because new functions can be reached. To this point, the design of autonomous system is emerging as an advanced functionality. This proposal represents the integration of molecular robots and suggests the autonomous molecular machine directed dissipative self-assembly and, thereby taking the next steps to bring these materials out of equilibrium and generate new functionalities. Also, a crucial step towards understanding the amplification of molecular robotic actions at macroscopic regime, to mimic the muscle-like materials using bottom-up approaches is proposed. The combination of self-assembly and molecular machines will play a significant role towards future applications in soft robotics, catalysis, medicinal science, and nanotechnology. Therefore, I believe that this can offer promising aspects in the development of next generation molecular materials.