Savita Ladage is a faculty member at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) for more than two-decade.  She has done her Ph. D. in chemistry education from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE, TIFR). She has associated with two major programmes at the center a) Indian National Chemistry Olympiad programme (INChO) and b) National Initiative on Undergraduate Science (NIUS) programme in chemistry.  Currently, she is also the National Coordinator for the NIUS programme of HBCSE.

She is passionate about understanding issues related to teaching and learning of chemistry particularly at the higher secondary and undergraduate levels. Her research and development interests are conceptual pitfalls/misconceptions in chemistry, problem designing (particularly context-based problems), and developing problem-based/ investigatory experiments for undergraduate chemistry laboratories.

She is involved in conducting workshops for teachers on a continual basis. Some of the topics covered by her are- Chemistry Education Research (CER) related to learning in chemistry laboratories at the undergraduate level; context-based problems, pedagogical significance and assessment; and standardization of experiments along with content and errors involved.

Ankush Gupta did his integrated masters in Chemistry from IIT Kanpur in 2005 and obtained a doctoral degree in Physical Chemistry from Cornell University (USA) in 2011. Since 2011, he worked in the National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies (CSIR), New Delhi as a Fellow Scientist for a year. Then he worked on an EU-sponsored project on bank filtration as a technology for drinking water supply in the Environmental Engineering department in IIT Roorkee for two and a half years. Since May 2015, he has been working as a Reader at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE, TIFR). His areas of interests are chemistry education and environmental education. He has been involved with the Chemistry Olympiad Program and National Initiative in Undergraduate Science program at HBCSE.

Scientific Staff

Indrani Das Sen has done her masters in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of North Bengal and joined Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) in 2006. Like other members of the chemistry group, she is involved with INChO and NIUS (chemistry) programmes.

She develops and standardizes experiments for undergraduate chemistry laboratory and also for the INChO programme. She has been guiding projects in interfacial chemistry. She is also actively involved in programmes for teachers and often leads discussions about the experiments in inorganic chemistry.

Former Member

Swapna Narvekar has done her masters in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Mumbai and joined Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE, TIFR) in 1996. She has been involved with various activities of the chemistry group at the centre and has been associated with the INChO programme since its inception. She is also involved with the NIUS programme in chemistry.

Her main area of work has been developing experiments for chemistry laboratory at the undergraduate level and for INChO and NIUS (chemistry) programmes. She also likes to develop demonstrations for high school students. She delivers sessions about analytical chemistry experiments and handles the discussions about designing experiments during camps/workshops for teachers.