NECTAR to host international workshop on cold plasma and pulse power in Shillong

Guwahati: The Northeast Center for Technology Application and Reach (NECTAR) will host the third International Workshop on Cold Plasma and Pulse Power Technologies for Food, Health and Agriculture (COFHA 2026) in Shillong on December 14 and 15, 2026.

The two-day workshop will bring together scientists, engineers, academics and researchers from India and abroad to discuss emerging applications in food preservation, agriculture, medicine, sterilization and environmental sustainability.

Cold plasma is an electrically energized gas that can be generated at relatively low temperatures. This makes it of interest to researchers studying how to treat heat-sensitive materials, including foods and seeds. Pulse power systems deliver energy in very short bursts and can be used to generate and control certain types of plasma. The workshop will examine the science behind these technologies and how they could be used across sectors.


Food safety and preservation sessions will examine how cold plasma might help reduce microbial contamination while maintaining food quality. In agriculture, one area of interest is seed treatment and how treated seeds respond during germination. These applications raise practical questions about how treatment conditions can be adapted to different foods and crops.

The workshop will also examine biomedical applications and plasma-based sterilisation. Environmental applications and the underlying chemistry and physics of plasma are separate programme themes. The pulse power sessions will look at the electrical systems used to generate short bursts of energy and how researchers can control those bursts for different applications.

Invited lectures will be complemented by oral presentations and poster sessions. The format will allow researchers to explain how their experiments are designed, discuss findings with specialists from other fields and identify opportunities for joint work. For students and research scholars in Northeast India, the Shillong workshop offers direct access to a scientific exchange spanning engineering, agriculture, food science and medicine.

The announced programme lists Prof. Eric Robert of CNRS/GREMI and the University of Orléans, France, and Prof. Kazunori Koga of Kyushu University, Japan. It also lists Prof. Eun Ha Choi of Kwangwoon University, South Korea, Prof. Joanna Pawlat of Lublin University of Technology, Poland, and Prof. Michael Keidar of George Washington University, United States. The brochure also names researchers affiliated with the Institute of Science Tokyo and Iwate University in Japan, the University of Graz in Austria, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan and Maejo University in Thailand.

Specialists from the Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Jodhpur, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Tezpur University and the Institute of Advanced Study in Science and Technology, Guwahati. The announced line-up includes Dr. Tapas Ganguli, Director of the Institute for Plasma Research, and specialists from the Centre of Plasma Physics–Institute for Plasma Research in Guwahati. Dr. Arun Kumar Sarma, Director General of NECTAR, is the workshop convenor. Mukesh Mathur, Scientist F, and Rajendra Jena, both of NECTAR, are co-convenors.

The North East Centre for Technology Application and Reach is an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. Across Northeast India, NECTAR pilots technologies and trains local users in agriculture and food processing, bamboo and handicrafts, waste management, and mapping with drones.