Dr. Girija Shankar Papanai is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Physical Sciences at South Asian University (an international university established jointly by the SAARC nations), New Delhi, India. Before joining South Asian University, he worked as a Research Associate at the Quantum Technology Research Centre, Solid State Physics Laboratory (DRDO), New Delhi, where his research focused on the physics of coherent population trapping for designing and developing Cesium (Cs) and Rubidium (Rb) based atomic clocks.
He obtained his PhD in Physical Sciences from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR) in 2022, with his research conducted at CSIR-National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi. His doctoral research focused on the synthesis and spectroscopy of two-dimensional (2D) materials. He synthesised highly crystalline, uniform, large area films of four 2D materials, graphene, MoS₂, WSe₂, and MoSe₂, and investigated a range of open problems in the field, including variations in the intensity ratio (I2D/IG) across single-layer graphene, the effect of temperature on Raman modes in twisted bilayer graphene, the complexities of identifying number of layers, synthesis pathways for different morphologies of monolayer MoS₂, and the influence of processing parameters on the structure, and quasiparticle behaviour of monolayer WSe₂ and MoSe₂.
From 2022 to 2025, he pursued postdoctoral research at the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry, Czech Republic; Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad, spending a substantial portion of his time at IISc, Bangalore. His research focused on the interaction of 2D materials (MoS₂, α-RuCl₃) with sputtered metallic thin films; photoinduced doping in MoS₂/hBN devices; and low-frequency fluctuations in trilayer graphene and graphene-TMD based van der Waals heterostructures. In addition, he has worked on design and optimization of superconductor–topological insulator based Josephson junctions for quantum technology applications.