Kumar Varoon Agrawal received his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 2005. Following this, he worked at the global R&D division of Procter & Gamble, Japan for a period of three years. He received his PhD (2013) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in the group of Prof. Michael Tsapatsis, developing two-dimensional zeolite nanosheets. He carried out postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Prof. Michael Strano, studying the effect of nanoconfinement on phase transition of fluids (2014-2016).
At EPFL, his group is engaged in material chemistry & engineering at the Å length-scale for high-performance inorganic & hybrid membranes for energy-efficient molecular separation. In particular, his group focuses on developing molecular-sieving membranes based on nanoporous two-dimensional materials such as defect-engineered single-layer graphene, exfoliated nanosheets with intrinsic porosity, and metal-organic frameworks.
He is an Early Career Editorial Board member of the Journal of Membrane Science. He is the recipient of AIChE Separation Division Graduate Student Award, North American Membrane Society Young Membrane Scientist Award, European Research Council Starting Grant, Swiss National Science Foundation Assistant Professor Energy Grant, among others.