About NERD

Notes on Engineering Research and Development

NERD is an exciting, student-led initiative. Students at IIT Kanpur came up with the idea of a student-led publication related to science and technology in magazine format. The idea has been around for a long while but the actual formulation began in June 2007 and the work started in December 2007. The magazine started publication in June 2008 as a quarterly magazine with additional special issues if required. The first year of operation ended on June 15, 2009. In the last issue of Volume 1, technical pieces written by students from various other institutes were published. The idea is to make NERD the national magazine on science and technology, run by the students and published for everyone. Hence starting June 2009 a lot of colleges have been involved and are still being pursued to give NERD a truly national and if possible, an international flavor. If you are a student or a professor or researcher in an engineering/sciences institute anywhere in the world, you can help us by getting people from your place involved in the magazine.

As the full form of the name suggests, the magazine is fully devoted to publishing content related with R&D in Engineering and Sciences along with articles of general interest associated with Science and Technology. NERD focuses on original research carried out by students from science and engineering streams across the world. Articles on work done in projects and internships, papers presented in conferences or published in journals, expositions on graduate theses et cetera are an integral part. Biographical profile of a woman scientist to encourage girls into research, interviews with renowned researchers, articles based on new pedagogical techniques, policy and perspective articles for some initiatives in their embryonic stages to encourage research and various general interest articles are also present in every issue.

Salient Features

  1. NERD publishes articles related to original work done by students in the form of semester projects, hobby projects, summer internships, BTech Projects, Graduate/Doctoral Theses and otherwise.
  2. We also publish articles of General Interest (any science and technology related field under the sun) which may not be work done by students but simply an expression of their interest in the field.
  3. These contributions are NOT papers but accurate versions that are more easily understandable to non expert audience and are written by students. There is a huge emphasis on comprehensibility of the content. That is what will make NERD different from a journal. We want that science and technology should be made accessible not just in the physical sense but also in terms of understanding. A one line explanation would be that all content should be well understood by an interested freshman.
  4. Magazine also carries interviews with famous scientists (Dr. Frances Allen, Dr. Leslie Valiant, Dr. David Morrison, Dr. Raman Sundrum, Dr. Martin Chalfie, Dr. Jayant Narlikar are some of the researchers/scientists we have interviewed) as well as faculty members who have been active in pedagogical aspects of science and technology.

The involvement of faculty members is a must for the success of this project. Many faculty members from all departments have also joined the initiative in order to guide and provide quality control. We are looking for more professors and researchers to mentor the entire effort. Note that this guidance is expected to be pro-bono as a support to something that is being done by the students.

The magazine serves the purpose of publicizing student research and available research opportunities as well as disseminating information in the area of research and development among students. We intend this to be an initiative of the students, by the students for everyone. NERD is supported by the Dean of Research and Development, IIT Kanpur.