Abhik Ghosh

Dr. Abhik Ghosh is an Indian national and a professor of chemistry at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway.

Dr. Ghosh obtained his B. Sc. (Honours) in chemistry from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He did his PhD under the supervision of Regents Professor Paul Gassman at the University of Minnesota in 1992 and subsequently postdoctoral research with Professor Lawrence Que, Jr., both at the University of Minnesota. During this period, he also collaborated extensively with Professor Jan Almlöf. He did a brief, second postdoc with Professor David Bocian at the University of California Riverside.

After postdoctoral stints in Minnesota and California, he moved to Tromsø, Norway, in 1996, where he has remained ever since. He has had several secondary positions/affiliations: Senior Fellow of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego (1997-2004), Outstanding Younger Researcher awardee of the Research Council of Norway (2004-2010), a co-principal investigator at the national center of excellence Centre for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (2007-2017), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, on many occasions (2006-2016). He edited two books, The Smallest Biomolecules: Diatomics and their Interactions with Heme Proteins (Elsevier, 2008), a monograph on the subject, and Letters to a Young Chemist (Wiley, 2011), a popular science book on careers in chemistry research. In 2014, he cowrote Arrow Pushing in Inorganic Chemistry: A Logical Approach to the Chemistry of the Main Group Elements (Wiley), the first textbook to apply arrow pushing to inorganic chemistry. He has served on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry (1999–2001, 2005–2007) and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines (2000–) and Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry (2007–present). As of 2019, he has authored/coauthored over 220 scientific papers and has an h-index of approximately 55.

Dr. Ghosh has contributed to many areas of porphyrin-related research. His early contributions include the use of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to study short-strong hydrogen bonds in porphyrin-type molecules and also some of the first large-scale ab initio calculations applied to porphyrins and other bioinorganic systems. He has had an abiding interest in the phenomenon of ligand noninnocence and has contributed substantially to studying the phenomenon in transition metal nitrosyl and corrole derivatives. In recent years, he has pioneered the field of heavy element corrole derivatives, which are unusual size-mismatched metal-ligand assemblies that incorporate a large 4d or 5d transition metal ion within the sterically compressed central cavity of a corrole. In this area he has reported some of the first examples of Tc, rhenium, osmium, platinum, and gold corroles. Despite their size-mismatched character, many of these complexes have proved surprisingly rugged and found applications as near-IR phosphorescent photosensitizers in oxygen sensing and photodynamic therapy as well as in dye-sensitized solar cells.