Research Programs

SPARKLE involves a student team of at least 4 members (at least 1 student from each year) responding to open challenges shared by faculty, industry, or alumni. These challenges may be ambitious, with no fixed timelines for completion. SPARKLE program focuses on promoting various skills including discovery, collaboration, invention, and startups. It provides the opportunities for students to engage in long-term research problems and create patents, publications, or startups for BITS Pilani.

SOLVE program includes an innovation program for Solving Societal and Business Problems. This students-initiated program encourages the students or group of students to work on a specific idea solving a critical societal/business problem.

Cross-Disciplinary Research Framework (CDRF) provides initiation grants to faculty members willing work in Interdisciplinary team on projects of society relevance. Against the first CDRF call, we have received 139 proposals involving 310 faculty members from our four campuses. We are also providing upto 40 lakhs of start-up grants to our new faculty. We have a budget of ~USD 2 Million per year to support CDRF and new faculty seed grants.

PhD Fellowship Enhancement for PhD scholars in BITS: BITS Pilani has enhanced the fellowship amount as per the recently revised Govt of India norms. We have over 1800 PhD scholars in our campuses right now. This number will be doubled over the next 3-4 years. This acknowledges the vital role that financial support plays in nurturing the growth of scholars and promoting excellence in academia. We have also doubled the contingency grant our PhD scholars receive.