This article appeared in Catalyst Magazine, Spring 2026
Visiting Berkeley for the first time as a high school student in the Bay Area, Neil Razdan says the campus seemed like Disneyland to him.
"It was the only thing I had seen that was comparable in size and the number of people," he says. "I really wanted to come here."
In 2017, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering. Inspired by his grandfather, an immigrant from India who was a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, he pursued his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota and then worked as an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2024, Razdan returned to Berkeley as a Free Radicals Era Professor, an endowed position supported by alumni involved in the free speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960s. He also leads a research group focused on catalysis and carbon circularity to address sustainability in the fuel industry. The endowed position, he says, "allows us to pursue science in a creative way."
"We know that carbon-based chemicals are essential for fuels, and that's why petrochemicals — fossil fuels — have been used in such abundance," Razdan says. "So how can we recover that carbon, or develop large-scale technologies that are less emission-intensive? One of the major ways of doing that is to improve the efficiency and creativity with which we catalyze, or accelerate, reactions."
Razdan's graduate training was in heterogeneous catalysis, a century-old field that was developed alongside the petrochemical industry. With his group of graduate student researchers, Razdan hopes to explore how they might introduce other fields of expertise, like homogeneous catalysis and electrochemistry, to the conversation about energy. His first postdoctoral hire was a synthetic organic chemist, a departure from the usual background of chemical engineers.
Razdan's interest in thinking outside the box began when he was just a high schooler who couldn't pick a favorite between his English literature and science classes. As an undergraduate, one of his favorite courses was Modern Philosophy, where he read classics by Descartes and Spinoza. He also has carried with him the lessons from a memorable lecture called "Chemical Engineering and the Other Humanities," given by his undergraduate advisor John Prausnitz.
"It always really stood out to me that there's this very strong historic link between philosophy and scientific thinking, but philosophy is almost mentioned with derision by scientists," Razdan says. "Philosophy is supposed to be outside our domain, but there is nonetheless a strong link."
Working with students now, Razdan aims to impart some of these same lessons. He sees training the next generation as the most important part of his job.
"When you're in the lab and trying to repair some piece of equipment, changing the world is too big to keep you motivated," Razdan says. "What's much closer to home is training the students so they're well-equipped to go do something at a startup, work in the chemical industry, or work at a national lab or another university. That's what I'm motivated by on a daily basis."