Bengaluru-origin boy makes it to Forbes ’30 Under 30’

A Bengaluru-origin 29-year-old Achuta Kadambi has been named in the prestigious Forbes magazine's 2019 "30 under 30" list for Science.

Kadambi, a second generation Indian American, is a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been named under the science category in the coveted list. The annual list honours emerging stars in 20 different industries.

Forbes 30 Under 30 list is released annually by Forbes magazine. Forbes recognises 600 business and industry figures, with 30 selected in twenty industries each. Asia and Europe also have ten categories, while Africa has a single list of 30 people. Forbes hosts associated conferences and a section of its website called 30 Under 30.

“It is a very prestigious honour for me and I am very glad to bring that to UCLA,” Kadambi said in an exclusive interview with DH.

Kadambi studied Bachelor of Science degree from UC Berkeley before completing his Masters degree from Yale University. He has also done his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kadambi’s prime focus area is to give robots extraordinary vision capabilities beyond what human eyes are capable of.

In fact, Kadambi credits a lot of his success to his parents who were from Bengaluru. His parents used to live in Jayanagar area of Bengaluru, before migrating to the US.

“I used to come to Bengaluru every year for the summers….. I last visited the place a year ago. Because of my parents' background, my experiences have been shaped as the technical rigour of the previous generation. Bengaluru is not only known for technological disruptions, but they are also looking for the social impact of it now,” he says.

The university, according to Kadambi, is looking to build an academic bridge with Bengaluru. “In terms of actual type of academic bridges that we are trying to build, the key is about how students want to build that bridge,” he says.

According to him, during his student days, he was used to building academic bridges by leveraging problems in India with the solutions in the west. “One of the projects that we were looking at was how to make a low-cost X-ray scanner. This is not the problem we were thinking from the US perspective. But it is very much needed in India,” he said about his student life experience.

The UCLA, for now, has active collaborations with IISc in Bengaluru. His honours include the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Computational Photography, the Lemelson-MIT student prize, the Qualcomm 100K Fellowship; and the Charles Draper Fellowship. 

“The world is looking for more collaborations – particularly from the people who are not in science and engineering. We are also looking for collaborations with artists and designers now,” he says.