The path to entrepreneurship

“Being born in Rawatbhata which houses India’s nuclear power plant played an important role in inculcating my desire to do a PhD. I was particularly fascinated with chemical bonding and how they determined the structures of molecules. My persistent passion to do science landed me the opportunity to work under an eminent scientist for my Master’s thesis.

This was during the time when lead contamination in Maggi noodles was all over our news channels. Maggi has ruled through all our childhoods and it was surprising to me that such an accusation had never come up before. I was intrigued. I thought maybe it was our water which was contaminated with lead and came up with an idea to separate it.

I went with this proposal to my supervisor and asked if I could work on purifying water contaminated with lead. He was very supportive and gave me the freedom to work on my idea. When we tried to publish our work it was rejected seven times! It was a challenge to make the work even better but we eventually did it.

I presented this project in the competition ‘Falling Walls Lab’ sponsored by DAAD where we had to give elevator pitches of our research projects . I won the first prize in the Indian edition that allowed me to visit Berlin and gave me an opportunity to talk about this work internationally. I had never expected such an exposure from a Master’s…