Dr. Harshad Gaikwad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Punjab, India. As an expert in microfluidics, electrokinetics, and fluid dynamics, his core research spans electrohydrodynamics, rheology, droplet spreading dynamics, and advanced numerical methods. He earned his PhD and MTech degrees from IIT Guwahati, where his doctoral research focused on electrohydrodynamics in narrow-fluidic channels. Dr. Gaikwad’s global academic footprint includes a prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Universität Bayreuth in Germany, alongside residential research collaboration at the University of Illinois Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory in the United States.

An active contributor to the scientific fraternity, Dr. Gaikwad has authored peer-reviewed research papers in reputed SCI journals. His research initiatives have been supported by competitive funding agencies, including the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB, India) under the MATRICS scheme. On the pedagogical front, he brings diverse teaching and mentorship experience to higher education, having taught cutting-edge domains such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Deep Learning, and Machine Learning. Committed to nurturing the next generation of engineers, he has successfully guided multiple institutional interns, BTech, and MTech thesis projects while maintaining rigorous quality standards as an active peer reviewer for prominent fluid mechanics journals.