Composites & Engineered Plastics have widespread applications in Aerospace, Automotive, Flexible Packaging, Industrial and Protective Materials not only for their superior performance but also for their safety as well.

Sarswati Koul (PhD), our next pathbreaker, Product Development Specialist (Toronto), works for start-up companies that mainly focus on cleantech products, taking ocean waste (dead animals, mainly crustaceans, lobsters, and other sea creatures) and turning that waste into powerful nanomaterials.

Sarswati talks to  Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about her PhD research that offers solutions to various industries, in preventing corrosion within steel materials and cooling turbines, and protection through radiation shielding.

For students, once you decide what you want to be ; work on it; plan on it and figure out the pain points – no way is easy, but you can make it with patience, tenacity and determination! 

Sarswati, Your background?

I grew up in Jammu & Kashmir, my childhood was filled with all normal middle-class values and daily activities, where education was always first priority. You might have heard about the migration of Kashmiris from Kashmir, so I was also one of them. My father was a government employee and mother was a homemaker. Our childhood was great till 1988. After the Kashmiri migration, I don’t remember having any extracurricular activities, because sustainability of our lives and safety was important. During my spare time, I used to read a lot about scientific inventions , as my interests were always around learning about scientific advancements. I had a habit of making pen friends and in those days (in 1991), when internet access was zero, I used to go to the library and bring a children’s magazine, find a corner where various names were being suggested for making pen friends. I was extremely interested in knowing about other countries, religions, geographies, culture, their technologies and daily life patterns. I had many friends from Indonesia, Scotland, Poland, Russia, and Pakistan. Some of them are out of touch but some are still in touch with me and I have few letters with me at my home town Jammu. I am the eldest child out of three girls, followed by two younger sisters. My childhood was all about sustaining daily life activities in a safe manner, till I graduated from Jammu university.      

What did you do for graduation/post-graduation? 

I took science subjects for my graduation and majored in organic chemistry and biology, followed by my master’s in applied chemistry from Jammu University. My master’s project was focused on the studies of Ibuprofen with Ranbaxy Inc., a Delhi based medical company. While studying for my masters, I wrote my JRE-CSIR exam and cracked it a second time. I joined Delhi college of Engineering’s Chemical Engineering department, my research work was completed at National Physical Laboratory -NPL, Pusa Gate Delhi.

I did my PhD from DCE (now DTU) and NPL collaboratively.

Can you tell us how you ended up in a career in research?

Since childhood, I was passionate about becoming a neurosurgeon and wanted to learn how neuroscience and engineering can be integrated so that cheap solutions can be offered to those who cannot afford the large amount of money for complicated surgeries. At that time, I had two options: either to go to a medical college in Jammu or attend a three year applied science degree, hence I diverted myself to a 3 year science program and decided to go for a PhD. 

The biggest influencers in my life are, respected Dr. A.P.J Kalam; Leo Tolstoy; Socrates and my mother. I did not have any specific mentor, excluding my PhD mentor and co-guide. Hailing from a middle class and economically weak family, after my master’s, I was being forced to get married, but securing my CSIR fellowship was my turning point. Being the eldest out of three sisters, I moved to Delhi permanently and brought my younger sisters to Delhi as well. Initially for one year I lived with various relatives till I got a residential apartment at NPL-pusa gate. Having a fellowship reduced my financial burden and allowed me to take care of my sisters too. I stayed with my younger sisters in NPL-colony for the next five years, till I completed my PhD. I was completely focused on completing my PhD, I hardly rested or had a chance to do anything else. 

How did you plan the steps to get into the career you wanted? Or how did you make a transition to a new career? Tell us about your career path.

My thought process was simple, logical and practical. I decided that if I did not get admission in medical college, I will do a master’s in chemistry or chemical engineering so that I can fulfill my passion by taking an alternate route. I would say don’t get depressed, hurt and never feel jealous over your friend’s success, just focus and believe in yourself, that there is something better kept for you. My thought process was very organized with a mind that was ready to face hardships while giving my very best. At early stages of our career, we don’t have much experience, but we have organized thinking that offers a range of skills that will develop over a period of time, including decision-making capabilities, problem solving, creative thinking, critical thinking, conclusiveness and rational approach. In this world of competition, do not run fast, know your pace and strength first, then go for it. That’s all about my thought process and I still hold on to these principles till date.  

My master’s was a three years applied degree and I majored in organic medicinal chemistry, following my project with Ranbaxy. During my master’s, I used to go to the Shriram Institute for accessing their analytical facilities. This interaction landed me a research job offer for a project which was in collaboration with BARC and Radiation Curing Centre -Mangalore University. The work was focused on epoxy-based composites, to be used for defense applications. I worked there after I submitted my master’s project and worked during the starting period of my PhD as well. My intention to join Shriram was to have financial support, get research industry exposure and get ready for the next level (PhD). I had planned my PhD already and was preparing for my research work side by side. Sriram institute is a private ISO organization, where contract research funded programs are run by different experts and the projects vary. They are also responsible for providing ISO certifications to customers for product applicability. This organization is still operational and highly functional.     

How did you decide on DCE and was the PhD topic related to your masters ?

My decision came after I cleared UGC test and I spent few open sessions at IIT-Delhi (chemical / polymeric engineering department), Delhi university (Chemistry Dept.). I finally landed in Delhi College of Engineering (Polymer technology). I was interested in the project because most of the problems given to students were based on real industry problems. That’s how I joined DCE, and my co-supervisor was from NPL as the project was given to NPL, and NPL was looking for a student who can work on this assigned problem. It was the main reason that my research work was done mostly at NPL and DCE jointly, but I had to complete all the course work from DCE as well. 

While pursuing my PhD from DCE (now DTU) and NPL collaboratively, my plan was to complete the program and then design medical equipment at low cost. 

My research study was a problem given by GE-Plastics to my co-supervisor at the National physical laboratory and the problem was assigned to three different students, so that the best solution can be taken further.

The problem given by GE-USA was to develop a conductive plastic that is processable, high temperature resistant, can absorb electromagnetic radiation and can act as good shielding material for higher frequency regions (2 GHz to 175GHz). This was assigned to one of my seniors in DCE but no positive results were derived. It was a very different approach; our advisor gave the same problem to three of us students and told us to come up with the solution. My co-supervisor from NPL was a pioneer in optoelectronics and semiconductors and was looking into Intrinsic conductive polymers (ICPs), which was a very new subject to me at that time. I started working, exploring conductive polymers and with passage of time, I synthesized some conductive polymers which were thermally stable till 2750C and can as well be processed with all commercial plastic structures.

Incidentally, during my PhD, I received an Indo-European study exchange fellowship, followed by an invitation for research study at University of Waterloo-Canada. I went to Technical University (Warsaw) for 3 months , where my focus was on studying polymers and their applications in biosensors. For all these research programs, I received full financial grants from CSIR (Council of Scientific Industrial Research) and DST (department of Science and Technology). I did not have any personal contacts, but I earned them through my hard work and honest approach. My work was acknowledged as the best innovation solution and was awarded two USA patents, followed by a young scientist award in 2001. 

My research work offered two solutions to various industries, one was to prevent corrosion within steel materials and cooling turbines, and the other solution was for protection through radiation shielding. You might have heard that nowadays we are surrounded by so many electromagnetic radiations, produced from 5G, radiation towers, electronics, and operating equipment. Most of these radiations are very hazardous and detrimental for human health, so these plastics offered protection against them till higher frequency range of 220 GHz. 

At Waterloo university, I worked with Prof. Arokia Nathan (Now at UK -Chair of Nanoelectronics Dept.) and Dr. Ghassan Jabbour (he was holding joint post at Arizona and Univ. of Ottawa). Under their supervision, I was focused on developing new types of conductive polymers, which can be used in making organic polymeric electronics. I prepared three polymers, which offered light yellow, orange and red color. Nowadays, the flat screen wall TV in your house is made by using these polymers, where you use touch panels and get the screen changed. We call it 3-D polymeric ink jet printing. I had  a chance to develop some polymers for RFIDs as well,  which have both magnetic and conductive properties, during my free time. It was a great learning moment for me, where I developed many new contacts and had an opportunity to meet pioneers in this field.  

(Dear students – I have a personal story to share with you, when I was selected for Warsaw technical university, my classmates used to be very curious about my work and results. It was a classmate who came to my advisor (Prof. Chandra) and mentioned the news. Honestly, I never thought of going out of India and offered my classmate to take the money and go on behalf of me. But my advisor called me and told me that it was a great accomplishment that I achieved on my own, and he told me to go and experience the other part of the world. The real world is beyond books, and one must stand alone to watch the shining sun and glittering moon. He is still my father figure, and I did not even have a passport. He helped me in getting my passport and visa in just five days as one of his ex-students was working in the passport office (Delhi) in a very high post. That was my first time travelling out of India.  

My key takeaway is that you can sustain with your positive ideology, focused mind and hard work even if few resources or no resources are given to you. One needs to generate the resources to the best of one’s abilities and there will be a day when you will be given everything that you deserve, but never forget honesty and hard work.               

How did you get your first break? 

While working on my PhD problem, GE plastics offered me a direct research scientist position while I was working as a research fellow at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Although the jobs were being posted by GE-USA, I requested a transfer to GE-INDIA Global research, Bangalore. I worked on the same product that I developed during my PhD but with a different approach. I learned a lot about corporate culture, tight schedules, customers and marked demands. After that, I joined Dow Chemical and Moen Inc., followed by a change in my marital status from single to married. During my work, I had a chance to travel to Europe, USA and many parts of Asia.

I completed my PhD in 2003 and worked at GE and Dow Chemicals after completing my PhD.

I worked at GE after completing my PhD, but the project problem funded to NPL was from GE-USA. So, after seeing my PhD results they offered me a job as soon as I submitted my thesis. At GE, you will find the product, called FARADEX- which offers shielding against Electromagnetic Interference (EMI). It was a great achievement, and I was unable to publish the results in research journals because of IP (intellectual property) issues for next 20 years. During my PhD, I synthesized the polymer which can be used for corrosion protection, hence I included that in my PhD work. At GE, my focus was to develop shielding material that can go into aerospace applications, especially in the cockpit, radar absorbing and high-tech defense applications. Earlier products were based on carbon black and carbon fibers, but they come with a few drawbacks and processing issues. Now, the product that you see in the market is a combination of tough plastic, intrinsic conductive polymers, and metallic fillers. Hence at present, when you see your laptop covers, cell phones and other electronic equipment covers, they are silver coloured, black, gray and many-coloured plastics—these are actually the plastics that can contain all these things, that’s why they are light weight and we call them extruded plastic materials. I worked at GE for almost two years. At GE, along with other projects, I also worked on shielding materials which included developing plastics for automotive head lights (Lexan), flame retardant interior coating materials for American Aerospace organizations that reduce the smoke density during accidents and bio-based materials to be used in coatings and other foam applications.

After that, I joined Dow Chemicals, where I worked on packaging solutions (Saran Films), Polyurethane, Epoxy resin, Polyethylene, Graphene materials and Bio-BDO materials. They are all very interesting projects where I worked with various customers, local, regional, and international. Then I moved to Moen Inc. where I was expected to develop products for showers and faucets, based on plastics as a replacement for metal and iron-based structures. If you remember our old showers and faucets, which were made with iron and steel, they have corrosion and product life cycle issues. Nowadays, we have all the washrooms and household faucets looking like steel, but they are made with plastics and steel fillers, which are more resistant to corrosion. We can see coloured showers and faucets, which was my project, and this is all extruded plastic material with prolonged life cycle and sustainable.         

I also worked at Phoenix and it was a short project based work, where the project was to develop automotive interiors based on biobased fibers. This work was more management, research, and product development in all together. 

After moving from Michigan to Ohio, I left my job due to a lot of family disturbances. My son was born, and after he turned one year old, we both moved to Canada. Since 2012, my son and I have been living in Toronto, where I teach part time and work as a scientific consultant for new startups, who are developing products in the clean tech industry.     

What were some of the challenges you faced? How did you address them?

Challenge 1: Raising my son alone in a country with cold weather, and supporting both of us.

Challenge 2: Getting back on my professional track and facing the personal challenges. 

Challenge 3 : Sustaining my goals and facing real world challenges. 

Dear Students, life has many ups and downs and I am not new to face them. I am just taking one step at a time, as raising a child and keeping up with your professional aspirations is very hard. Hence, I took a break and continued with my work part-time, addressing the need of the moment while paying less attention to my desired professional goals. I took one step at a time, as doing too many things at a time will make you exhausted and non-productive. Now as my son is in 8th grade, I am currently dedicating more time towards my professional goals along with my son’s education. Take every day as it is and keep yourself aware of the latest happenings in your area wherever else you want to exceed.

Where do you work now? What problems do you solve?

Currently, I live in Canada and work for start-up companies, mainly focused on cleantech products, where we take the ocean waste (dead animals, mainly crustaceans, lobsters, and other sea creatures) and turn that waste into powerful nanomaterials. These nanomaterials are being used in coatings and in the paper/ pulp industry. The main idea is to create sustainable products where we can recycle and upcycle waste materials for the benefit of human society. 

What skills are needed for a job? How did you acquire the skills?

For this job, one needs a good background of material science, sustainable ESG knowledge, understanding of recycling/upcycling chemistry,  product design and market potential along with proper knowledge of circular economy. My initial bachelors and masters helped me, and finally my PhD research work helped me a lot in understanding product design and analytical techniques along with real market needs. My work experience helped me in acquiring some of the skill sets.

In Canada, I started volunteering at my son’s school where I offered them STEM based projects as it was a way to save my daycare expenses and take care of my son as well. Soon, I was a bit popular among students, so I started teaching IB students part-time. I devote most of my time to my research as my son is now in 8th grade.    

What’s a typical day like?

My typical work days are spent in lab based experimental work, reading work, mentoring interns and exploring new materials for different applications. Some days, I need to visit university (York and Toronto) for analytical testing and project discussions, hence some variations.   The most important thing that I love about this job is that it’s more focused on addressing real issues ,which everyone is trying to solve across the globe. We need to take care of nature by proving the sustainable solutions,  

How does your work benefit society? 

Commenting on plastic materials, at present we use so many electronics simultaneously without any interruptions. If you remember previously, when we were kids, if we turned on the TV and iron in the same room, there would be a lot of interference. Nowadays the plastic that people use offers protection against radiation across a wide frequency range, this will help organizations and society to use many equipment interfaces without interrupting each other. Although research is still going on from a product sustainability point of view, we still need more advancement in materials properties.   

Tell us an example of a specific memorable work you did that is very close to you!

My PhD work is the most memorable work. As a student, it was a difficult period, as I had to cope with financial stress, pass the course work and maintain the grades and my research work. Those days we did not have good access to transportation, it used to take me three hours from NPL to DTU and then finally coming back to NPL-Pusa. Daily, I would spend seven hours travelling and I used those hours for studying. I completed my research work at NPL, while staying up late. Many times during weekends, my sister would accompany me. She would sleep on the couch, and I would do my experimental work. The best things come in your life unexpectedly, once I was suffering from a very high fever and I left the ongoing experiment for two days. 

The new material that I collected after three days was a new water-soluble polymer, offering corrosion prevention to steel and cooling water turbines. The new plastic shielding material was developed by GE-plastics (now sold in the market under Faradex material) as a new product,and as a student, I was compensated with some royalty money. All these incidents taught me that while resources do support your work potential, it’s the zest towards your goal that helps you to reach them. 

For the first time when I had a chance to meet Prof. A.P.J. Kalam, I asked his advice on my work and he said, “As aeronautical engineers, we always follow a principle of dragging and lifting off; if we don’t drag properly, there will be a great turbulence while lifting off and similarly during landing, if we don’t maintain a balance between the uplifting force and torque, our landing will not be smooth. A similar principle holds true in all aspects of life. I hold this principle still in my soul, as success and depression are just for a moment, balance it with a calm and focused mind with a huge trust in supernatural power.    

Your advice to students based on your experience?

My advice to students based on my experiences are as:-

  1. Be curious to learn what interests you.
  2. Set your goals as everyone cannot achieve the same but each and everyone of us has special skills and we need to work on them to achieve mastery. 
  3. Be yourself and don’t compare yourself with others. I know we live in a society where comparison is an important stigma. I also faced it, but never took it seriously, believe in yourself and be ready to face the obstacles.
  4. Once you decide what you want to be ; work on it; plan on it and figure out the pain points – no way is easy, but you can make it with determination. 
  5. Keep friendship with patience, faith, diligence. Choose good mentors; and your friends very carefully as you will be known by the company you keep 
  6. Take one thing at a time, sometimes you can do multitasking but try to avoid it
  7. Value your life and yourself as it’s easy to harm yourself, but it also takes courage to live your dreams. 
  8. Stay away from distractions – you will have it in all walks of life, but your attitude determines how you avoid them  
  9. Don’t feel hurt when your plan does not work as per your wish – in the real world, life never works as we plan; be the moderator and use your best potential in that moment of opportunity. 
  10. Be the leader – whom people will follow rather than those who exploit their juniors
  11. Learn from everyone – a child’s innocence teaches us the value of purity while a rude person’s rudeness and cleverness teaches us the impact of bad behavior
  12. Believe in family values and never forget your roots and parents – they are your identity and  true well-wishers in this whole world
  13. Take time to relax, enjoy with your friends, serve the community and society
  14. Be real, believe in modesty and retain humanity irrespective of caste or creed.
  15. Love yourself, like yourself, admire yourself, criticize yourself, celebrate your success, learn from your mistakes, spend time with elders as they teach you through experience, maintain a diary and follow your passion. Live your life with grace and earn a great reputation. People will remember you only through your actions.

Future Plans?

Create my own start-up with a potential of devising sustainable products for automotive, healthcare and packaging industries. I am currently involved with one of the non-profit organizations, known as “prevent cancer now”, where I along with the other expert’s from Toronto Medical University, study and evaluate various factors that affect our kids (we go to SickKids hospital, which is in Toronto, and is mainly dedicated to kids with long term diseases). Personally, I am interested in creating wide awareness among our kids so that they will avoid junk food, too much sugar and the prolonged exposure to radiation through video games. I am associated with one charity in India (Kashmiri overseas), where I help students financially along with my family members, who require help in paying their fees. My future plan is to help more such students as well as old people who don’t have access to costly medications. We three sisters and my brother-in-law have created a small fund, which can be used by Kashmiri migrant kids, whose families still live in Camps-Jammu (Nagorata).  

Thank You Very Much For Giving Me An Opportunity To Introduce Me To Yourself