Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ (IIT Madras) Energy Consortium and Shell India have partnered to launch the ‘Shell IITM Centre for Energy Research’ (SICER). The inauguration ceremony, which took place at the Shell Technology Centre in Bengaluru on Wednesday, marks a significant milestone in collaborative research and strategic engagement between academia and industry.
The collaboration will be centralised under SICER for five years and will promote innovation, research, development, piloting, and commercialization of technologies in the energy sector, says a release.
The key outcomes envisaged include research collaborations in critical challenges and opportunities in the energy transition space, incubation of energy start-ups by leveraging the start-up ecosystem of IIT Madras and the Shell Chair Professorship which will act as a bridge and enable knowledge exchange between Shell and IIT Madras, along with the continuation of Shell’s participation in the Energy Consortium.
As part of the initiative, Satyanarayanan Seshadri was announced as the first-ever Shell Chair Professor at IIT Madras. He is the Head of the Energy Consortium at IIT Madras and a faculty member in the Department of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering at IIT Madras.