Brain drain continues: Dr. Shashikant Kadam is leaving for a multinational oil and gas company

Unfortunately, brain drain from our institute continues. Dr. Shashikant Kadam is joining BP p.l.c., a multinational Oil and Gas company in the UK as a Senior Research Chemist. We congratulate him very much on this achievement, although we are sorry to see a promising scientist go. This is another departure after Dr. Haider Golam and a loss to our institute. We wrote about Dr. Golam here.

Shashi has previously worked at our institute from 2016-2018 as a researcher in the field of heterogenous catalysis and FT-IR Operando spectroscopy with his involvement particularly in the development of Operando reactor infrastructure. He then moved to University of California at Berkeley as a postdoctoral scholar (2018-2020) and returned back to the institute to continue his research career from 2021-2023 in the Department of Nanocatalysis as an Associate Scientist.

He was involved and significantly contributed to developing and constructing unique methodologies and infrastructures in the Nanocatalysis group, for example, construction of a short resident time reference reactor with main focus on kinetics and mechanistic understanding of catalytic reactions by coupling several spectroscopic techniques, along with many in-house and international collaborations.

“The cooperation with my colleagues in the department was great, however, to be an independent researcher, it was challenging to acquire visibility that is required to obtain Czech grants in spite of having an excellent CV with diverse experience with international mobility in renowned labs across the world.  With the increasing limited availability of academic opportunities, I decided to evaluate my options critically and beyond the typical academic path. In addition, I am at a point of my career where I am looking for a long-term stable position with competitive salaries and work environment open to equal opportunities”, said Shashi Kadam about the reasons for leaving.

We wish Shashi Kadam every success in his new position. He will continue the ongoing collaboration with the group, and will stay in touch.