N. Kalaiselvi

Nallathamby Kalaiselvi (born 1967) is an Indian chemist whose research expertise is in electrochemistry, and she became the first woman Director General of India's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Born in Tamil Nadu, she studied chemistry at the Government Arts Colleges in Tirunelveli and Coimbatore and took her doctorate in electrochemistry at Annamalai University. She works on battery technology, including lithium ion batteries, and on energy policy, has published well over a hundred research articles and holds patents, and from 2012 to 2017 she led the MULTI-FUN project on electrodes and electrolytes at CSIR. She became director of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute in 2019 and was appointed Director General of CSIR in 2022.