Prof. N. K. Bose was the Founder President of the Calcutta University Chemical Engineering Alumni Association and the first Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Calcutta. He joined the erstwhile Department of Applied Chemistry as the first Professor of Chemical Engineering in 1962. The Department of Applied Chemistry has a history going back to 1920's, set up at the behest of Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, the first Institute for serving the fledgling Chemical Industry in India, and was also amongst the first to start teaching Chemical Engineering. However, the courses designed in 1920's and 30's were not adequate to keep up with the fast changing demands of the expanding Chemical Industry of an independent and growing India, where new institutes like IIT's were coming up. Prof. Bose had the foresight to realize that a break with tradition was necessary to reorganize and modernize the Department in order to keep up with fast changing needs. It was only through his relentless efforts for over a decade that the modernized courses in Chemical Engineering were finally offered and the Department reconstituted as Chemical Engineering. He served the Department as Head for over a decade and was actively associated with the Department till his death in 2004. He was one of the leading Chemical Engineers of his genre and served as the President of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1979 and 1980.

It is his vision that inspires us today to work together to take our Department to a greater height in the field of Chemical Engineering, multi-dimensionally to teaching and research and then to industrial applications. For fulfilling his vision the Alumni Association in its 5th Annual General Meeting, decided to institute a Fellowship in the memory of Prof. N. K. Bose with a view to carrying out research and promoting creative ideas in Chemical Engineering in close collaboration with the Department. It was proposed to create a new Fund by the name of late Prof. N. K. Bose and accordingly, our alumni in different parts of the World responded for making donations to the Fund. The following are the names of our alumni who donated generously to initiate the research fellowship fund.