PROFILE

Richard Fernandes

Email: richard.fernandes@apu.edu.in

Richard was a Research Associate at the University of Louisville and subsequently worked at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore till 1990.

In 1990, he teamed up with a group of interested educators and co-founded Centre For Learning, an “alternative” school in Bangalore where he designed, developed and implemented laboratory based curricula for learning Physics.

He has also explored his entrepreneurial skills and has designed and executed a wide range of automation projects for industries and research laboratories primarily in the area of supervisory control, data acquisition and robotic positioning systems.

He is a strong believer in the dictum that “Physics is best learnt by doing” and enjoys building experimental apparatus from material found in scrap yards or cannibalized from discarded instruments. He rejects the “black box” approach to experiments.

He is an avid do-it-yourselfer and enjoys tinkering, wood working and machining and has many unfinished projects in his home.

Academic qualifications

• Ph.D.(1978), Raman Research Institute, Bangalore
• M.Sc.(1973), IIT Kharagpur
• B.Sc.(Hons) (1971), IIT Kharagpur

Teaching

Subjects taught at the University: Physics

Areas of Interest

Design of laboratory-based curricula for the teaching of Physics

Research Interests

• Past as well as present. Structure-property relationships in thermotropic and lyotropic polymeric liquid crystals and plastic crystals
• Solid state polymorphism
• Infrared Spectroscopy, Rayleigh and Raman Scattering, X-Ray diffraction, Calorimetry, Laser Ellipsometry and Conoscopy
• Instrumentation