Research Overview

IIT Kanpur is a leading institute of India that is focused on education and research in science, technology, management and humanities. Its alumni and faculty have consistently won national and international awards for their accomplishments.

Worldwide the academia abounds with researchers who were students or faculty at IIT Kanpur.

In other fields the courageous, critical thinking led approach of its alumni and faculty has manifested itself as thought leadership in their chosen field.

Faculty and students at IITK respect the fact that to do path breaking research, in addition to knowledge in an area, one requires creativity, self belief, courage and persistence.

Great research requires risk taking ability. The IITK culture offers support and encouragement to take on challenging work. This enables researchers to work on the important problems in their field. The strong institutional support enables the researchers to ask tough questions knowing that finding the answers will take time and effort.

At IITK, there is great support for creativity driven exploration. For example tinkering. Tinkering has led to some of the greatest discoveries and inventions. The IITK environment supports and enables tinkering. This support backs creativity and helps researchers try out ideas easily. An inconsistency noticed while doing creativity driven exploration could be the small crack that ultimately opens big doors to new knowledge.

Quality research happens more often in a culture where free thinking is encouraged and that is very true for IITK. The drive and commitment for research is sustained because at IITK a researcher is able to enjoy the research work to the fullest.

The institute encourages active learning to help build critical thinking skills of its students and prepare them for research. Quality research needs committed students to move the research agenda forward. Therefore a student at IITK gets a world class education and gets to participate in great research work.

For the students it is an ideal place to learn how high quality research is done. Being a science intensive engineering education the students are more future ready and are able to adapt to new technologies. And thanks to the big emerging opportunities for new technologies, more and more students are today choosing a research oriented job over a job that does not involve formal research. IITK prepares its students well for such jobs.

The teaching done by faculty helps the faculty grow. The faculty is encouraged to develop new courses based on their research. The faculty also have the freedom to modify existing courses to include content related to their research.

The faculty benefit from the dedicated PhD students of IITK, who are key to the success of research at IITK.

At IITK, young faculty can start teaching early in their career and this enhances their ability to do challenging research.

Leveraging the research capabilities of IITK can give businesses the decisive edge they seek.The in-depth. approach leads to outcomes that deliver lasting value.The IITK client list includes leading companies worldwide.

A significant proportion of the research done at IITK is interdisciplinary.There are interdisciplinary academic programmes and interdisciplinary research centres facilities at IITK.
These lead to great interdisciplinary interaction at IITK and facilitate collaboration for interdisciplinary research. The open research environment encourages interaction with others leading to extraordinary research work.

Research at IITK is done by small individual led research groups and there are also large interdisciplinary project teams. The research environment supports highly creative work done by a small group. At the same time the environment is suitable for managing the large mission critical assignments that are undertaken at IITK.

There is a large talent pool of high level researchers so there is great opportunity for need based collaboration. Due to the vibrant research environment at IITK there is regular exposure to new ideas. It helps young researchers to prepare their mind and see the big picture in their area of interest.

A researcher enjoys the independence to choose the research area. This independence is there at all faculty levels. The researcher is supported by a dynamic research administration that has a non-bureaucratic work culture.