Aarohan: PhD Students Retreat 2025
A culture of collaboration is central to the innovative and intellectual life at Ahmedabad University and to the purpose of continuous self- and societal progress. From learning to ask the right questions to developing methods to answer them, the research enterprise at Ahmedabad University, comprising faculty, students, laboratories, centres, and partners, is driven by curiosity to discover and explain, and by a deep sense of responsibility to translate knowledge for the benefit of society. Interdisciplinarity at Ahmedabad stems from a strong recognition that complex problems require multiple systems of knowledge to solve them, often drawn from the remotest of disciplines; hence, we continue to listen to others, their discoveries, and their intellectual moorings.
Aarohan, Ahmedabad University's first retreat for doctoral students, was conceived in this spirit. It sought to challenge the idea of doctoral research as a solitary pursuit and instead reframe it as a shared, upward journey shaped through dialogue, openness, and interdisciplinary exchange.
The retreat brought together doctoral students working across a broad spectrum of inquiry, spanning the sciences, engineering, management, public health, and the arts and humanities. Research conversations ranged from clean energy transitions through green hydrogen electrocatalysts and climate economy interactions, to indoor air quality, dementia and maternal mental health, computational and quantum systems, road safety and infrastructure, ecological behaviour, wastewater treatment, labour and well-being in the gig economy, and historical, cultural, and literary studies rooted in regional and global contexts.
This breadth of themes underscored the richness of the University's research landscape and illustrated how diverse lines of inquiry can inform and enrich one another when placed in conversation.
