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.
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.