Dr. Dhirendra Bahadur is at present a visiting professor and head of the school of Chemical and Materials Sciences at IIT, Goa. Before  this, he was professor in charge, Research & Development at IIT Goa. Prior to  that,he was with the department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science at IIT, Bombay and served as professor and institute chair professor for several years. He served at various capacities at IIT, Kanpur and IIT, Bombay between 1978 and 2018. He was a visiting fellow of the Royal society London- INSA exchange program and worked at Cavendish Laboratory, 1985-86. He was also visiting scientist at, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada between 1987 and 1988 and guest scientist at Forshungzentrum Juelich, Germany several times between 1995 and 2002. During the period 2006-2007 he was at, ICMCB, Bordeaux, France and served as Associate Director, Research. His present research interests are in the area of nanostructured oxide materials their hybrids,  graphene derivatives  and its hybrids, magnetic materials at nano scale and their applications in cancer theranostics, targeted delivery, water purification and photocatalysis and sensing.
Professor Bahadur received medal of the materials research society of India, 1996 and MRSI-ICSC superconductivity and materials science annual prize for the year 2011. He was awarded the Govt of India 7th National Research award in Nano Science & Technology in 2013. He was awarded Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2015. During the survey of Stanford university, USA, 2020, he was recently named within top 1% of scientists of the world. Research.com, a prominent academic platform for scientists, has published the 2022 Edition of Ranking of Top 1000 Scientists in the area of Materials Science, Prof. Dhibrendra Bahadur was placed 23rd in ranking. He was a member of the Indo-French committee on solid state chemistry laboratory 2003-2005. He also served as an expert member of PAC of materials, minerals and metallurgy of DST, Govt of India between 2007 and 2012. He also was an expert member of 11th plan committee on materials of Department of Atomic Energy, Govt. of India that he continued during 12th plan. He was Co-Chairman of the Task Force on Nanobiotechnology, DBT, Government of India between 2014 and 2017. He was a member of Programme Advisory committee (PAC) on Technology System development programme (TSDP) of DST, Govt of India between 2013 and 2017. He was a member of PAC, DST on condensed matter & materials science (2019-2021). He served on the editorial advisory boards of Transactions Indian Institute of metals 2004-2005, Bulletin of Materials Science since 2004-2010, Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (2013-2016). He is at present in the editorial board of Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group).
He is coauthor/author of more than 390 publications in international journals and book chapters and five books and nineteen patents. His h-index is 63 and citation is more than 14000. He was also one of the guest editors for a special volume of Bull. Mater. Sci., 2006 and International Journal of Science Research, 2012. Professor Bahadur was a theme editor of a special issue on “Hybrid nanostructures for diagnostics and therapeutics” of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews published by Elsevier in Nov, 2011.
Professor Bahadur has organized several international conferences. Some of these are "International Symposium on Recent Advances in Inorganic Materials" in 2002, "Indo-Singapore Symposium on Advanced Functional Materials" in 2006. He organized an International Conference on Nano Science and Nano Technology (ICONSAT 2010) in Feb, 2010. The selected papers presented during this conference have been published in International Journal of Nanoscience, 2011, for which Prof. Bahadur was an editor. He organized a SERB school on materials on the theme “Advanced Materials at Nano and Atomic scale”at IIT Goa during Feb 10-28, 2019.