IITH hosts industry summit to strengthen industry–academia partnerships

The Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) hosted its first Industry Summit 2026, bringing together nearly 100 delegates from around 40 leading industries spanning oil and energy, materials, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical sectors here on Tuesday.

The summit served as a dynamic platform for interaction between industry leaders, researchers, faculty, and students, with discussions centered on advancing innovation in alignment with national priorities and the vision of Viksit Bharat. The event aimed to move beyond conventional academic engagement toward structured and outcome-driven collaboration.

The programme featured research showcases across diverse and emerging domains, including sustainability and clean energy, catalysis, healthcare technologies, critical minerals, advanced materials, polymers and soft matter, artificial intelligence and machine learning in chemical engineering, computational modelling, and fluid dynamics. Interactive poster sessions and guided laboratory visits enabled industry delegates to engage directly with research scholars, creating opportunities for translational research partnerships.

A key highlight of the summit was a panel discussion titled “Beyond Collaboration: Building an Actionable Industry–Academia Framework for Viksit Bharat.” The panel emphasised the need to transition from traditional memorandum-of-understanding-based associations to deeper partnerships involving co-developed research programmes, industry-embedded internships, joint doctoral supervision, and accelerated technology translation.

Chief Guest Achyut Ghatak, Director (Technical), Coal India Limited, underscored the importance of trust-based collaboration between academia and industry. He noted that India’s growth trajectory depends on faster commercialization of research and stronger integration of academic innovation with industrial scale-up. He reaffirmed support on behalf of Coal India Limited for the recently established CLEANZ Centre of Excellence at IITH, focused on clean coal energy with net-zero emissions.

In a video message, Prof. B. S. Murty, Director of IITH, reiterated the institute’s commitment to research excellence and innovation-driven impact. He stressed that premier institutions must act as engines of technological transformation by aligning research efforts with industrial priorities and national development goals.

Prof. Chandra Shekhar Sharma, Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, described the summit as a milestone initiative. He stated that the event marks the beginning of sustained partnerships focused on co-creation, where academia and industry jointly define challenges, develop solutions, and translate research into scalable impact.

The summit concluded with a collective resolve to institutionalize the engagement as an annual platform and initiate focused follow-up interactions with participating industries in the coming months.