About the Anil Kumar Travel Award

The ENC Anil Kumar Travel Award is created to honor Professor Anil Kumar, currently Professor Emeritus, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. Prof. Anil Kumar obtained his Master’s degree from Agra University (1961) and PhD degree in 1969 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, under the supervision of Prof. B.D.N. Rao. He did his Post-doctoral research in the United States at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Sydney Gordon) and at the University of North Carolina (Charles Johnson). He then moved to the laboratory of Prof. R.R. Ernst, (ETH Zurich) where he performed the first 2D NMR experiment in liquids and the first 2D Fourier imaging experiment. He was also the first one to observe transient oscillations in cross-polarization dynamics in solids.  Anil Kumar returned to India and joined Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore as a Faculty member in January 1977. Here he started to work on further developments in two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy. He returned to Zurich for the academic year 1979-80, in a joint project of Prof. Ernst and Prof. Wuthrich. During this period, he was the first one to apply the two-dimensional Nuclear Overhauser Effect experiment, (popularly known as NOESY) in a protein, which opened the field for the determination of three-dimensional structures of biomolecules in solution by NMR. In his laboratory in India, he continued to explore challenging problems such as the study of cross-correlations in relaxation. He has major contributions in the field of NMR quantum information processing and NMR quantum computing and has pioneered several experimental aspects. Additionally, Prof. Anil Kumar has played a major role in popularizing the power of the modern NMR methodology and has been largely responsible for the current wide-spread use of the technique in India.

The Anil Kumar Travel Award is funded with contributions from Professor Anil Kumar’s former Ph.D. students, collaborators, short-term workers, colleagues, and well-wishers. The Travel Award will be focused on reflecting Prof. Anil Kumar’s broad interests in the development of multi-dimensional NMR methods and the application of NMR in chemical, biological and imaging sciences. 

Applicant Eligibility

• Applicant must be a postdoctoral fellow or an a late-stage graduate student at the time of conference.
• The research and submitted abstract of the applicant should show work with significant involvement in the development and applications of advanced NMR techniques or methods.
• Applicant must attend the ENC conference to accept the award and present either a poster or talk.
• Complete the online application by the January 10 deadline

2024 Recipient

Jacob Lindale
Postdoctoral Fellow
Duke University