The 4th Professor S.N. Balasubrahmanyam Endowment Lecture | 3:00 PM | 5 January 2026 |

Speaker: Gautam Desiraju
Emeritus Professor
SSCU, IISc

ABSTRACT
Crystal Engineering, the design of organic solids, has now become a frontline discipline in the chemical sciences. In this talk, I will trace, from my personal perspective, the origins of this subject from supramolecular chemistry to the stage when it has become the source of new subjects, like the design of improved solid drug forms, flexible and dynamic crystals, and towards higher-order synthetic strategies. Chemistry is synthesis, and crystal engineering is a form of synthesis that defines a crystal as a complex entity. The molecular crystal becomes the synthetic target. Molecules give us crystals, but in the process, the chemist moves from simplicity to complexity. Crystal engineering is therefore the same, and not quite the same.
See desiraju.in

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Gautam Desiraju is an Emeritus Professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. He is a pioneer in crystal engineering, focusing on the role of weak hydrogen bonds and creating the idea of the “supramolecular synthon.” He was the President of the International Union of Crystallography from 2011 to 2014. He studied at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and earned his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1976. He has written and edited several important books, including Organic Solid State Chemistry (1987), Crystal Engineering: The Design of Organic Solids (1989), The Crystal as a Supramolecular Entity (1996), The Weak Hydrogen Bond: In Structural Chemistry and Biology (1999, with T. Steiner), Crystal Design: structure and Function (2003), Crystal Engineering: A Textbook (2011, with J. J. Vittal and A. Ramanan), Bhārat: India 2.0 (2022), 'Delimitation and States Reorganization: For a Better Democracy in Bharat' (2025), ‘Fixing Science in India’ (2025), ‘India’s Supply Chains in a World at War’ (2025), and ‘India: Science, Politics, Geostrategy’ (2025). He remains one of India’s most cited chemists and is a leading voice on the future of chemistry and science in the country.