Career

Most fellowship applications are written in private, submitted in silence, and never spoken of again unless they succeed. I want to do the opposite. This is the first entry in Fellowship Diaries — a public log of my preparation for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowship. Why write it down where anyone can read it Three reasons. First, it forces clarity. The MSCA is scored on three axes — Excellence, Impact, and Implementation — and a proposal only works when you can state, in plain language, what your scientific problem is, why it matters to Europe, and exactly how you’ll deliver. Writing for a reader who is not in my sub-field is the fastest way to find the sentences that don’t yet make sense. My Research Vision page was the first product of that discipline; this series is the running commentary. ...

In a university lab, a successful experiment might produce 50 milligrams of a new catalyst. In industry, the same idea is only interesting if it survives the journey to tonnes — without losing performance, blowing the cost model, or failing at hour 10,000. Having worked across academic research (IIT Bombay, the Weizmann Institute) and now industrial R&D at BPCL, I’ve come to see these not as two career paths but as two halves of one discipline. Here is what the industrial half teaches you that the academic half rarely does. ...