Biography

Ramanujan is a Fellow of the American Society of Materials and a Fellow of the Maharashtra Academy of Science. He received his Master of Engineering and Ph.D. degrees in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA. At CMU, he was the recipient of a Fellowship from a U.S. National Science Foundation grant. He earned his Bachelor’s degree (First Class Honors) from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Ramanujan is/was the Editor or Editorial Board member of several international journals, including Nanomedicine, Materials Science and Engineering B (Advanced Functional Solid State Materials), Materials Science and Engineering C (Materials for Biological Applications), Metals, Materials and Processes and Metallurgical and Materials Transactions. He serves/has served on the Magnetic Materials Committee of TMS (Chair), Awards Committee of TMS,   Phase Transformations Committee of TMS (USA), Program Committee (IEEE, Magnetics Society), IEEE (Magnetics Society, Singapore Chapter) and the Public Sector Funding Review Panel (Singapore).

Prior to joining NTU, Ramanujan has worked at Advanced Devices and Materials (USA), University of Birmingham (U.K.), Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA). At NTU, he has received the Nanyang Award for Excellence in Teaching. Ramanujan is/was a Visiting Professor in overseas universities, including South China University of Technology, University of North Texas, University of Mumbai and the Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (India). He has organized several international symposia on advanced functional materials and delivered many invited talks at major international conferences and prestigious universities.

Current Research Interests

Project: Magnetic Nanofluids for Cooling Devices with Electricity Harvesting from Waste Heat  

The main research objectives are to use magnetic nanofluids for cooling devices and to utilize waste heat for electricity harvesting. In many commercial and industrial processes, high temperature is achieved, which is currently wasted. We propose the use of novel, high performance, service temperature tunable, self-pumping magnetic nanofluids to utilize the waste heat for energy harvesting. In Phase 1 of this CREATE program we have successfully developed low cost, high performance, self-pumping magnetic nanofluids with record relative cooling power; another unique advantage of our approach is that of energy harvesting. To the best of our knowledge, linking magnetic nanofluids to cooling and electricity harvesting has never been reported so far. Our approach can be readily extended to cooling of a variety of systems, e.g., electronic devices.

Selected Publications

A.S. Ahmed and R.V. Ramanujan, Magnetic field triggered multicycle damage sensing and self healing, Sci. Reports (Nature publishing group), 5, 13773 (2015).

S. Shukla, P.K. Dehri and R.V. Ramanujan, Magnetic nanomaterials, Invited Encyclopedia Chapter, Springer Handbook of Nanomaterials, R. Vajtai (ed.) (2013).

V. Swaminathan, P.K.Deheri, S.D. Bhame and R.V.Ramanujan, Novel microwave assisted synthesis of Nd2Fe14B hard magnetic nanoparticles, Nanoscale, 5, 2718-2725 (2013).

V.Q. Nguyen, A.S. Ahmed and R.V. Ramanujan, Morphing soft magnetic composites, Adv. Mater., 24, 4041-4054 (2012).

S. Purushotham and R.V. Ramanujan, Thermoresponsive magnetic composite nanomaterials for multimodal cancer therapy, Acta Biomater., 6, 502-510 (2010). Best Paper Award