Podila elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics

Ramakrishna Podila, a materials physicist in the Clemson University Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.

The Institute of Physics is a professional society based in the United Kingdom and Ireland with about 21,000 members worldwide.

Podila was honored for his role in shaping modern condensed matter and applied physics.

“It’s an honor to be selected as a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. Having a panel of peer reviewers who you do not know and with whom you have not collaborated telling you that you are deserving, is humbling,” Podila said. 

Interdisciplinary research

Podila’s research is highly interdisciplinary and combines physics, chemistry, biology and materials science. His previous work focused on three broad areas: energy conversion and storage, nano-bio interfaces, and photonics and bioimaging.

His seminal contributions in nanoscience and nanobiophysics led to the discovery of new fundamental phenomena in low-dimensional materials and their applications in energy, health and photonics. Podila has made pioneering contributions to the physics of energy storage, particularly in the development of next-generation supercapacitors and batteries. He also has advanced the field of ambient energy harvesting through his triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) research.

Pioneering contributions

“My group’s work has been very multidisciplinary. Physics is at its core, but we venture out into different areas, like energy, health and optics. The boundaries between sciences are very blurred and not really relevant anymore,” he said.

Podila continued, “Look at any problems that have transformed the world, be it genetics or computing, all these revolutionary technologies, at the core, there was a physics person who picked up a non-physics problem and made a huge impact. The motto of our lab is from discovery to device.”

His research group is currently pursuing new research directions in foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum biology.

“A lot of biology ignores quantum phenomena,” he said. 

Podila’s group is looking at viral quasi species with the goal of finding some quantum effects hidden in wet and noisy biological environments. The group submitted a paper a couple of months ago, and Podila presented the work at the American Physical Society in March. 

Next big thing

“Quantum biology, I think, is going to be the next big thing,” Podila said. “I hope it starts a new body of work in applying quantum to how viruses replicate and in general, that could have impact on how evolution happens. There are a lot of challenges in there. It’s still a nascent, emerging field. But that’s how it always starts, with one crazy paper. I’m hoping the paper we submitted will be the crazy paper that instigates a new area of work.”

Podila’s research has been supported by the highest government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NASA and the U.S. Army, and many global companies.

He has authored more than 100 publications in scholarly journals, including multiple articles that have been extensively cited. Web of Science, an online index that covers journal articles published in various sciences and the arts and humanities, listed one of his papers in materials chemistry in the top 1% of cited articles in the field. He also holds two U.S. patents.

Podila received his master’s in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology at Roorkee in 2007 and his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Clemson in 2011. After graduation, he served as a postdoctoral fellow in nanomedicine at Eastern Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine.

He joined Clemson as an assistant professor in 2015 and was promoted to associate professor in 2020.

While at Clemson, Podila received the Roaring10 Award from the Clemson Young Alumni Council (2019) and the Rising Star in Discovery Award for the College of Science (2021). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.