Brief résumé

Snigdha Kar is a chemist with a background spanning inorganic materials chemistry, heterogeneous electrocatalysis, electrochemistry and energy materials. She completed an integrated BS–MS degree in Chemistry at the National Institute of Technology Agartala, graduating First Class with Distinction, and spent an extended research period at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

Her master’s research focused on earth-abundant transition-metal electrocatalysts for alkaline water oxidation, where she engineered nickel-oxalate/hematite heterostructures and investigated how local electronic structure and interfacial interactions influence catalytic performance. 

She subsequently worked as a Research Assistant on transition-metal carbonate hydroxides and related electrode materials for high-performance supercapacitors. Snigdha also gained international research experience through a prestigious MITACS Globalink Research Internship at Acadia University, Canada. Her experimental expertise includes wet-chemical and hydrothermal synthesis, electrodeposition, XRD, XPS, SEM, TEM, Raman spectroscopy and a broad range of electrochemical techniques.

Research at TU Wien

PhD project “Configurational Disorder as a Design Tool for Tailoring Oxygen Storage and Transport in High-Entropy Oxides”

At TU Wien, Snigdha investigates how configurational disorder in high-entropy oxides can be harnessed to control lattice-oxygen chemistry. Her work addresses a fundamental question: Can the thermodynamics and kinetics of oxygen exchange be tuned as partly independent parameters through composition and local structural disorder?

In conventional oxides, oxygen-vacancy formation and oxygen migration are often strongly coupled. Compositionally complex oxides, however, offer a much richer landscape of local metal–oxygen environments. Snigdha explores whether specific configurations can provide low-energy vacancy-formation sites, while others create low-barrier pathways for oxygen migration and surface exchange. Her central objective is to determine whether vacancy-formation energetics and oxygen-transport kinetics can be partially decoupled and independently optimized. Such control may establish a new design paradigm for redox-active oxides, enabling materials that combine tailored oxygen-storage capacity with rapid oxygen exchange and improved structural stability. These concepts are particularly relevant to chemical looping, thermochemical energy storage, thermochemical CO₂ and H₂O splitting, energy conversion and lattice-oxygen-mediated catalysis.