Update "Filter Coffee: Akshay S" cover image.

_posts/2022-08-29-filter-coffee-akshay-s.md

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 title: "Filter Coffee: Akshay Subramanian"
 category: filtercoffee
 tags: [wona]
-image: filter-coffee-akshay-s-cover.png
+image: filter-coffee-akshay-s-cover.jpg
 excerpt: "Akshay Subramanian is a 2021 graduate from the Metallurgy and Material Sciences department. He has won the Director’s Gold Medal and Department Gold Medal for being the best all-rounder amongst all graduating students at IIT-R."
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 **Akshay**: I think, especially in the area of ML applied to Material Science, in India, there aren’t many groups working on this, and even the job opportunities are bleak. The center of research, at least in this area, is mostly in the USA and Europe and for computational material science, going abroad is definitely a good option to get exposed to cutting-edge research, but also important to have and promote this interdisciplinary research in India. Right now, what I see is like in each department, there are professors working in a particular field of research, and there isn’t much intermingling between the departments in doing collaborations on interdisciplinary areas. Like I would love to see some collaboration between profs in the metallurgy department and those in CS, because the combination of this expertise would make for some really good and exciting research in these areas, so definitely I would like to see collaboration improve in the future both in other groups within the university as well as industry collaborations which are much more common in universities abroad. The project which I will be working on to start off my Ph.D. at MIT will be in collaboration with an industry in Japan. I think these kinds of opportunities are unique, and universities in India should also try and get some industry experience both in India as well as abroad.
 
-![pic0](/images/posts/filter-coffee-akshay-s-01.jpg)
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 **WO!**: You’ve interned in IISC, Berkeley Lab, and even grabbed the MITACS intern. First off, were they remote interns? How did you apply? and how was your experience in each of them?
 
 **Akshay**: First of all, as a disclaimer, I was offered MITACS, but I didn’t take it, so it was a choice between Berkeley and MITACS. But the two internships that I ended up doing were the IISc one and the Berkeley one. The IISc internship was an in-person internship which was much before this COVID situation. I actually went there, and at that time, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do computational material science. It was an experimental research project where I had to actually prepare samples, do microscopy, etc. So that was an experience that did not directly help me towards my Ph.D.. Still, I think it helped open my eyes to some of the things that I wanted to automate in experimental material science, why certain things needed computation to actually automate them. Hence, it gave me those kinds of perspectives. Also, the facilities at IISc were great; I worked at the high-voltage engineering lab there, which had some outstanding facilities.