Dr. Arun Kumar Pal is a theoretical and computational chemist with research experience in excited-state photophysics, molecular magnetism, and transition-metal reactivity. He earned his PhD from IIT Bombay (2015), where he studied magnetic exchange coupling in organic radicals and photomagnetic systems. He then held postdoctoral positions at IIT Kharagpur, State University of New York at Buffalo, IACS Kolkata, and IISER Kolkata. He is currently Associate Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean (Research) at SR University, Warangal.

His research uses DFT, TD-DFT with optimally tuned range-separated functionals, multireference wavefunction methods, and coupled-cluster benchmarks. He applies them to singlet fission, thermally activated delayed fluorescence, symmetry-breaking charge separation, heavy-atom-free photosensitizers, and transition-metal catalysis. He has published 39 peer-reviewed papers (h-index 15, 12 as first author) in journals including Chemical Science, JCTC, Angewandte Chemie, and Inorganic Chemistry. Many of these come from close collaborations with experimental groups in spectroscopy, synthesis, and catalysis.

He works with major quantum-chemistry packages and programs in Python, and C. He taught quantum chemistry, spectroscopy, and computational chemistry at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His current work focuses on designing organic radicals for molecular magnetism and qubit technologies.