Saurabh Chitnis

Saurabh Chitnis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Science. He relocated to UVic in July 2025 after seven years at Dalhousie University, where he began his independent career in 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2023. His research lab focuses on synthetic inorganic chemistry, particularly inorganic polymers, main group coordination complexes, and materials for sustainable technologies.

Chitnis earned his BSc from McMaster University and his PhD from the University of Victoria in 2015 under Neil Burford, where his work earned the Governor General’s Gold Medal. He was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol with Ian Manners and later conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto with Douglas Stephan. His academic training has been supported by prestigious awards including the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship.

His research lies at the intersection of fundamental and applied inorganic chemistry. He explores new inorganic polymers and materials for green technologies and develops novel coordination complexes of main group elements to unlock new reactivity and catalytic applications. His group uses a combination of experimental techniques—including Schlenk lines, gloveboxes, NMR, X-ray crystallography, and electrochemistry—and computational modeling with Gaussian and ADF software on Compute Canada clusters.

The 15 most recent publications highlight a strong focus on phosphorus- and bismuth-based chemistry, pincer ligands, inorganic connectors, and hybrid polymers. Themes include geometric constraint, Lewis acidity tuning, stereochemical control, and applications in catalysis and materials science. The work spans fundamental bonding studies to applied materials development for biodegradable plastics and low-carbon technologies.

His scientific contributions have been recognized with several awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2023), Dalhousie Faculty of Science Killam Research Prize (2023), and the CNC-IUPAC Travel Award (2023). He has also been featured in Chemical Communications and Dalton Transactions as an Emerging Investigator and New Talent.

Chitnis actively mentors a diverse research group comprising postdoctoral researchers, PhD and MSc students, and undergraduate honours students. He supports trainees in securing external funding such as NSERC, Banting, and Killam fellowships. His group collaborates widely, including with the Drover group at Western University and the Macdonald group at Dalhousie. He is currently recruiting graduate and undergraduate students for experimental inorganic chemistry projects.

The Chitnis lab is equipped with advanced infrastructure, including multiple Schlenk lines, gloveboxes, elemental analyzers, NMR spectrometers (up to 700 MHz), Raman spectroscopy, and single-crystal X-ray diffractometers. Computational resources are supported through Compute Canada’s Cedar and Graham clusters.