About Me
γένοι ̓ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών
”Become such as you are, having learned what that is”
(Pythian Odes, Pindar)
I'm Rochan Sinha, co-founder and CTO of Newtrace. I work on developing advanced materials, components, and systems to make lower-cost, scalable green hydrogen production a reality in the next decade (or less).
Most of my time at Newtrace is split between building a high-performance team, leading new product development, and turning lab-scale prototypes into commercial-scale products that work reliably in the real world.
Some days it means getting deep into scientific and engineering challenges. On others, it requires navigating hard technical trade-offs and translating complex technical decisions into plain language that customers, investors, and the rest of the company can make sense of.
I started this blog as a place to think more clearly about the things I keep returning to. A lot of the writing is (or will be) about technology, climate, and the hard things about building hardware.
Background
My route into this field started during my undergraduate years, when an internship at a solar module manufacturing plant introduced me to renewable energy technologies. That pulled me toward materials science and electrochemistry during my master's, leading to a thesis on solid-state battery cathode materials at IMEC in Belgium.
I then went on to a PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, working on materials for solar-driven water splitting. That gave me my first serious exposure to hydrogen, and led me to my current work on trying to achieve cheap and efficient gigascale hydrogen production.
I returned to India in 2020, briefly explored a materials informatics venture, and eventually found my way back to the kind of problem I had been drawn to for years: climate problems where advances in electrochemistry and materials can translate into industrial hardware. That path led to my current work on next-generation electrolyzers and advanced materials at Newtrace.
Personal Stuff and Side Projects
I also write about personal topics when the mood strikes.
I currently live in Bengaluru. Outside work, I read a lot, chill with my partner and two cats, build increasingly complex Lego sets, and work on personal projects such as:
- A website to help early-career engineers and scientists find roles in hardware startups.
- An Apple-II GUI-inspired pomodoro app.
- A horizontal, hierarchical task manager.
- A transcription script for super-long recordings with a high degree of multi-lingual content.