The crystal engineer
Biswajit Bhattacharya researches mechanically flexible materials in Adlershof
Medinipur, Nagpur, Kolkata, Adlershof. Along these stages of his educational and professional path, Biswajit Bhattacharya has literally come a long way. For three years now, this workplace has been on Richard Willstätter Strasse, where the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) has a branch. Bhattacharya works in the materials chemistry department.
On what exactly? Well, let’s try and explain: He makes rigid and brittle crystals “plastically flexible”, enabling them to be used for producing pliable and malleable materials: “I change the crystal structure and rearrange molecules in a particular way. I’m a crystal engineer.”
For Bhattacharya, Adlershof is his place of work as well as the place where he lives. He lives with his family on 60 square metres at the IBZ, which is short for Internationales Begegnungszentrum, an international meeting centre and academic guesthouse. A comfortable place to live, he finds. His wife Jhili is a historian by trade. Their daughter Aranyaa had almost turned three when her parents arrived in Germany. She goes to the “Kita am Studio” nursery school on the opposite side of the road: “She really only has to cross the street. We can watch our daughter play outside from our window.” Their son, Aritrik, was born a year ago in Germany.
When materials react with each other, they change their colour and appearance. The fact that, in chemistry, these changes can be smelled and touched had fascinated Bhattacharya early on when he went to school in the provincial town of Manikpara. Born in Northeast India 35 years ago, he grew up in a time when his country experienced rapid modernisation. He seized the opportunities arising from this with both hands.
He finished his bachelor’s degree in Medinipur, a large city nearby. For his master’s degree, he moved 1,100 kilometres further west to the even larger city of Nagpur, the state capital of Maharashtra. For his PhD, Bhattacharya returned to his native West Bengal, to Kolkata. It was here that he started his professional career at a scientific research centre. And where he applied for the Adolf Martens Fellowship Programme of BAM. He was admitted only two months later. As someone who had never left India, a long dream became true for Bhattacharya.
“Germany is the best possible place for science,” he says. At least that’s what he heard from all his lecturers in India who had already been: “I always dreamed of coming here.” He appreciated the “truly comfortable quality of life” and the balance between work and leisure. In Adlershof, he values the academic environment, including the proximity to Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since June, he has now been receiving a follow-up grant from the German Research Foundation, which he will receive until 2024. He wouldn’t mind staying longer.
Dr. Winfried Dolderer for Adlershof Journal