Ranbir Chadha

IB Diploma Candidate, Class of 2027 · Hill Spring International School, Mumbai

My work sits where chemistry and biology meet real problems: a magnetic iron nanoparticle for wastewater treatment, metal–organic frameworks that capture arsenic, an industrial chemistry internship, a colorimetric test for drink spiking, and a review of angiogenesis in pancreatic cancer. Outside the laboratory, I founded and lead Youth of Tomorrow Model United Nations, a free international programme that has trained more than 500 students from over 25 countries.

Research · Materials Chemistry

Synthesis of a Magnetic Iron Nanoparticle for Wastewater Treatment

Ramnarain Ruia College, Mumbai2025 – presentPatent in progress

Working with two professors and two master's students at Ruia College, I synthesised a novel magnetic iron nanoparticle and tested its performance independently. The team is now pursuing a patent for its applications across industries.

Rationale

Nanoparticles are effective in water treatment because of their very high surface area relative to their mass, which gives contaminants far more surface to bind to. That same small size is also their main weakness: once added to water, they are extremely difficult to remove by conventional filtration.

I attempted to solve that problem by designing a magnetic nanoparticle, so that it can be collected after use. This allows the particles to be recovered rather than being left behind in the environment.

My contribution

Carried out the synthesis of the nanoparticle under the supervision of the faculty team.
Designed and conducted independent tests of the particle's performance.
Contributed to the work now being prepared for a patent covering cross-industry uses.

Research · Porous Materials

Metal–Organic Frameworks for Arsenic Removal from Water

Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), MumbaiUnder Professor Manish Yadav2025 – present

I initiated this project at ICT, under Professor Manish Yadav. After a literature review of how arsenic is removed from water, I came up with the idea of designing metal–organic frameworks and modifying them after synthesis to increase their arsenic uptake, targeting one of India's most serious water pollutants.

The problem

Arsenic occurs naturally in the groundwater of large parts of India, particularly across the Ganga–Brahmaputra basin, and millions of people draw drinking water from contaminated wells. It has no colour, smell or taste, and long-term exposure causes skin lesions and several cancers. Removing it cheaply and reliably, especially where there is no central treatment plant, remains an unsolved problem.

Why metal–organic frameworks

Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline materials built from metal clusters joined by organic linker molecules. The result is a rigid scaffold full of regular pores with an exceptionally large internal surface area. Because both the metal and the linker can be chosen, the size and chemistry of the pores can be tuned for a specific target.

I designed and built the framework, then post-synthetically modified it, chemically altering it after synthesis, for example by attaching new functional groups, so that its pores bind arsenic more strongly and its arsenic uptake increases.

My contribution

Conducted a literature review of arsenic removal methods and the materials used for it.
Came up with the idea and initiated the project, proposing it to Professor Manish Yadav at ICT.
Designed and synthesised metal–organic frameworks in the laboratory at ICT.
Carried out post-synthetic modifications to increase their arsenic uptake.

Two routes to cleaner water

At Ruia College my nanoparticle is pulled out of water with a magnet. At ICT the framework works like a tunable sponge, with pores designed to hold arsenic. Both ask the same question: how do you remove a pollutant without leaving something else behind?

See Nanoparticle Synthesis →

Original Research · Computational Chemistry · Machine Learning

Drink Spike Indicator

Independent research projectIRIS National Fair, Chemistry2026

A low-cost colour-change strip to detect date-rape drugs in a drink. I used molecular docking to find a natural pigment that binds spiking drugs, and trained a machine-learning model to read a multi-zone indicator built around it.

PDF

Computational Screening of Beverage Components and Machine-Learning Classification of a Multi-Zone Colourimetric Indicator for Drink-Spiking Detection

Research paper · Ranbir Chadha

Read paper ↗

The problem

Drink spiking is a common route to drug-facilitated sexual assault, and it is badly under-reported: in the United Kingdom, around 90% of people whose drink was spiked did not contact the police. The drugs involved, such as GHB and benzodiazepines, are colourless, odourless and almost tasteless. Laboratory methods such as GC-MS are reliable but need heavy equipment, and commercial kits test for one drug class at a time and often fail in cocktails and other complex drinks.

Method

Used a literature review and case reports to choose the drugs most often used in spiking (GHB, alprazolam, clonazepam, diazepam and zolpidem) and the drinks most often involved.
Docked each drug against five common beverage components (citric acid, cyanidin-3-glucoside, ethanol, ethyl acetate and gallic acid) using Smina on the Tamarind Bio platform.
Calculated hydrogen bonding, polar surface area, LogP and solubility for every compound in SwissADME to explain the binding results.
Trained an XGBoost classifier on 14 sensor-response channels, with drink type, drug and concentration, to separate spiked from unspiked drinks.

Docked poses of cyanidin-3-glucoside with five spiking drugs — Figure 1 from the paper. Docking complexes of cyanidin-3-glucoside (cyan) with (A) diazepam, (B) GHB, (C) zolpidem, (D) clonazepam and (E) alprazolam.

Finding the reagent

Cyanidin-3-glucoside, a natural anthocyanin pigment found in berries, bound all five drugs more strongly than any other drink component. Its many hydrogen-bonding sites and large polar surface area explain why, and because its colour already shifts with pH, it is a strong candidate for the colour-changing element of the strip. GHB bound weakly to everything, so it will likely need a separate detection method.

Drug	Binding to cyanidin-3-glucoside (kcal/mol)
Zolpidem	−4.3
Clonazepam	−4.3
Diazepam	−4.2
Alprazolam	−4.2
GHB	−2.6

More negative values mean stronger binding.

Model results on the test set

0.950AUROC

88.2%accuracy

488 / 559spiked samples correctly identified

89.2%F1 score (precision 91.2%, recall 87.3%)

Limitations and next steps

Smina was designed for protein–ligand docking, so the affinities between two small molecules are best read as rankings rather than exact binding energies. The model also left out drink pH, which changes both the structure and the colour of cyanidin-3-glucoside, and anthocyanins already present in berry juices and red wine could interfere with the indicator.

The next stage is to fix cyanidin-3-glucoside onto a paper strip, test it in real drinks by UV-Vis spectroscopy, measure detection limits at realistic doses, and extend the screen to ketamine and scopolamine.

Read the article: “A Strip of Colour Against Drink Spiking” →

Internship · Technical Author · Waste Reduction

Industrial Internship at Valorganics Private Limited

Valorganics Pvt. Ltd.Industrial Lab Trainee, Technical Report Author2025 – present

As an industrial lab trainee and technical report author at Valorganics, I worked on real manufacturing processes, from the plant flow sheet to the finished product, with a focus on reducing waste: turning off-specification product into saleable material and comparing production routes by the waste they create.

Waste reduction

Recrystallised cream-coloured, off-specification 4-HAP until it met its colour specification, so the batch could be sold rather than discarded.
Showed that a methanol–water recrystallisation reached the same colour at 85% yield, against about 34.5% for ethyl acetate–ethanol, so far less product was lost, and without activated charcoal, which would otherwise end up as solid waste.
Compared three ways of manufacturing 4-chloro-2-aminophenol by the waste each produces: iron sludge from Fe/HCl, solvent to recover from methanol, and an isolation step removed by hydrogenating directly in water.
Documented each procedure as a full technical report.

Key findings

4-Hydroxyacetophenone (4-HAP) is an intermediate in one industrial route to paracetamol and an ingredient in cosmetic formulations. Its colour is part of the commercial specification, because a cream tint indicates oxidation and condensation by-products.

Recrystallising cream-coloured plant flake lowered the APHA colour from 204.8 to 51.8, a reduction of 74.7%, measured on a Lovibond PFX-i colorimeter to ASTM D1209. The methanol–water procedure achieved this at 85% yield without activated charcoal.

In the process report I explained the selectivity of the first step: only the chlorine ortho to the nitro group is displaced, because the negative charge of the Meisenheimer intermediate can be delocalised onto the nitro oxygens. I then compared the three reduction routes for cost, waste and handling.

Bar chart: APHA colour 204.8 for crude 4-HAP and 51.8 after recrystallisation — Figure 1. APHA colour of 4-HAP before and after recrystallisation.

From the laboratory

Jacketed glass reactor with overhead stirrer — Dissolution in the stirred, heated reactor.

Round-bottom flask during crystallisation — Crystallisation of 4-HAP.

Measuring colour on a Lovibond colorimeter — APHA colour measurement on the Lovibond PFX-i.

Crude cream flakes beside white recrystallised 4-HAP — Crude plant flake (left) and recrystallised product (right).

Reaction scheme for the preparation of 4-chloro-2-aminophenol by three reduction routes — Figure 2. Reaction scheme from the 4-chloro-2-aminophenol process report: hydrolysis, then reduction by routes A, B and C.

What the internship taught me

In a school laboratory a reaction is judged by whether it works. On a plant it is judged by yield, purity, solvent cost, waste and safety at the scale of kilograms. Writing these reports meant working out why each step of a route had been chosen, and stating clearly where the plant data came from and what had or had not been measured.

Read the article: “What a Plant Floor Taught Me About Chemistry” →

Leadership · Diplomacy

Model United Nations: Training and Empowerment

Founder & Secretary-General, YTMUNChaired 7 committees2022 – present

Model UN taught me to research, argue, negotiate and lead. I founded Youth of Tomorrow Model United Nations so that students who could not afford formal training would still have that opportunity: it is free, online, and open to students anywhere in the world.

500+students trained

25+countries represented

5editions organised

Freefor every participant

Youth of Tomorrow Model United Nations

Strong MUN training is usually expensive or limited to a few schools. YTMUN was built on the idea that skill in diplomacy should not depend on what a student can pay. Each edition begins with online training, in which students with no prior experience learn to research a country's position, write a position paper, speak in committee and draft resolutions. It ends with a full conference where they put those skills into practice.

As founder and Secretary-General I built the organisation from the beginning: recruiting the secretariat, writing the training programme, setting committee agendas and running each conference. Participation grew from 30 delegates in the first edition to 60 in the second and 100 in the third. Over five editions the programme has trained more than 500 students from over 25 countries.

Read the article: “Why Diplomacy Should Be Free” →

Awards as a delegate

Conference	Award
Harvard Model United Nations India	Best Delegate
Aditya Birla Model United Nations	Best Delegate
IIMUN India	Best Delegate
JBCN Borivali MUN	Outstanding Delegate

Further awards across more than 20 conferences attended since 2022.

Leadership on the dais

Conference	Position
YTMUN (five editions)	Founder & Secretary-General
Spring MUN 2026	Chair, UN Security Council (35+ delegates)
7 committees	Chair
JBCNMUN, OISMUN, Spring MUN	Executive Board

As a chair I moderate debate, keep proceedings fair, and mentor delegates through negotiation and policy drafting.

Additional Record

Education

Hill Spring International School, MumbaiIB Diploma Programme, 2025–2027. HL: Mathematics AA, Chemistry, Biology. SL: Global Politics, English Language & Literature, Spanish ab initio.
JBCN International School, ParelIGCSE, 2016–2020.
Extended Essay, BiologyAllelopathy: the effect of sorghum leaf extract on seedling root growth, using a self-designed bioassay.
Online courseworkOrganometallic catalysts, Technical University of Denmark.

Honours & Competitions

British Biology OlympiadBronze Award, 2026
World Scholar's Cup3rd in debate among 500+ teams at the Global Round; qualified for the Tournament of Champions at Yale, winning 9 medals (6 gold).

Service & Leadership

Sion Hospital, MumbaiLed a crowdfunding campaign raising about $40,000 for Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital; ran hygiene and cleanliness drives for paediatric patients.
Terra Cat ShelterRaised about $2,000 for surgeries on injured strays; assisted with medication and sterilisation of equipment.
Monsoon Resilience GuidebookWith Tribes for Good, interviewed informal workers and distributed a safety handbook to more than 50 of them.
MuktanganTeaching academic concepts to children from underprivileged schools every Friday.
JBCN STEM ClubPresident, 2023–2025.

Ranbir Chadha

Synthesis of a Magnetic Iron Nanoparticle for Wastewater Treatment

Rationale

My contribution

Metal–Organic Frameworks for Arsenic Removal from Water

The problem

Why metal–organic frameworks

My contribution

Drink Spike Indicator

Computational Screening of Beverage Components and Machine-Learning Classification of a Multi-Zone Colourimetric Indicator for Drink-Spiking Detection

The problem

Method

Finding the reagent

Model results on the test set

Limitations and next steps

Industrial Internship at Valorganics Private Limited

Waste reduction

Key findings

From the laboratory

What the internship taught me

Model United Nations: Training and Empowerment

Youth of Tomorrow Model United Nations

Awards as a delegate

Leadership on the dais

Independent Research

The Role of Angiogenesis in Pancreatic Cancer: Clinical Models and Therapeutic Implications

Articles

Why Diplomacy Should Be Free

What a Plant Floor Taught Me About Chemistry

A Strip of Colour Against Drink Spiking

What Losing a Pet Taught Me About Cancer Research

Additional Record

Education

Honours & Competitions

Service & Leadership