Profile: Prashant Deshlahra

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING

If chemistry is your passion, then Professor Deshlahra is someone you should meet. In fact, his passion for catalysis in particular is what led him to Tufts. “I really enjoyed the research [on catalysis] I did at both [Berkeley and Notre Dame] so I applied for faculty positions at places that do good work in that. I was really impressed by the research groups when I visited Tufts and by the kinds of questions that students asked during seminars.” Those student questions especially made for the right environment for him. “Having small groups but being in close interaction with them, and working with undergraduates—that was all very exciting to me.”

Professor Deshlahra’s love for chemistry began back in high school. A preference for the subject, along with a strong mathematics background, pushed him towards the field of chemical engineering when he went to college. “I was intrigued by the applications to energy and the environment, [especially] trying to understand chemical processes and trying to design components or materials that help them run most efficiently and safely and using that to address challenges.” His research may be focused on understanding and designing chemical catalysts, but the implications and impact are broad. Chemical engineering impacts so much—“making products we use in our daily lives, addressing challenges like energy, making batteries, or designing drugs…The chemical industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. They use a lot of energy and produce a lot of side products that can harm the environment. My research is focused on how to make that process of chemical production more efficient, more sustainable.”

The Deshlahra Lab in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering is where this work takes place. Supported by both graduate and undergraduate students, Professor Deshlahra creates new catalysts and uses calculus and spectroscopy to test their efficiency. “The catalysts are typically high surface area porous powders and when you zoom in on the nanoscale they have very small metal particles or some combination of metals and oxide. So we make catalysts and test them, then look at how they appear using spectroscopy. In addition, we do computational work where we make models of the atomic arrangement and run simulations to see how stable a particular reaction would be and which path it’s most likely to take.” Undergraduate students can make real contributions in the lab as well. “They bring a lot of energy, they ask good questions, and they’re excited,” all of which tend to matter the most when learning something new.

In terms of teaching, one of Professor Deshlahra’s main undergraduate courses is Reactor Design. It involves “trying to model a reactor, and looking at the size of the reaction and how things are flowing, what do you expect the output to be? It’s really exciting to teach. We apply a lot of things that students have learned earlier and combine it with code writing using Python, so it’s a fun course.” He also designed a course called Computational Chemistry and Applications to Catalysis which teaches students “how to use quantum mechanics to do atomic scale modeling and apply those concepts to a project of their own choice. It’s very exciting to see students of different backgrounds apply the knowledge to a project that they started in another class.” The interdisciplinary mindset that permeates the Tufts experience can truly be found everywhere. And with professors like Prashant Deshlahra supporting you, exciting discoveries are just a step away.