Thiruvananthapuram: A youth hailing from the city has featured in this year’s Forbes list.Kishor Govind Nayar, who grew up in PTP Nagar and studied at Trivandrum Loyola School is listed in the ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ list in the energy section. He is currently developing a desalination technology that can customize the ions in water for different uses.The list, published recently, recognizes the brightest young entrepreneurs, researchers and game-changers in the world.Kishor was the South India topper in the ISC Plus Two board exam in 2008. He did mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US from where he started his work on seawater property characterization.“Seawater property characterization was what I started my work at MIT in 2012. Thanks to the good resources at MIT, I could rise to the top of that field. About 100 journal papers have cited that work. Close to 30,000 people have visited the MIT website where we distribute the software free-of-charge,” said Kishor in an email interview.The IAPWS, an international standards organization for water and seawater properties, recognized my work and invited me to their annual meeting in Kyoto, Japan in 2017.“They recognized my expertise and elected me to two of their committees. It was a rare honour. At 26, I was the youngest person on the seawater properties committee and the first Indian citizen on it. Right now I am the only Indian on both committees,” he said.Kishor is at present developing next-generation systems for treating seawater desalination brine (i.e. wastewater generate) treatment systems, more efficient ways to produce salt, and better ways to desalinate water for agriculture.“I'm currently developing a technology called ISED (intelligent selective electrodialysis) that selectively removes certain ions from salty water,” he said.A Saudi Arabian investor has invested through MIT to see if a startup could be built around the technology. ISED could benefit several industries like greenhouses, lithium mining industry, salt production and oil and gas industry.It’s not that Kishor is just interested in research alone. He is also a yoga-meditation enthusiast and volunteers a lot of his time.“I had incorporated yoga-meditation into my startup work as well. The past year when I had recruited a small team to evaluate the agriculture industry, we always began our team meetings with me leading a quick breathing technique to relax everyone and have them all be present 100%. I have found that teams that meditate together really perform extremely well, with much less conflict,” he said.

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