IIT Madras faculty gets elected as member of US NAE, only second Indian to do so

Prof R I Sujith is only the second Indian to be elected to the aerospace section of the NAE

A faculty from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) has been elected as an international member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE), only the second Indian to get the honour.

Prof R I Sujith, who was elected in recognition of his contributions to engineering for applications of dynamical systems theory to the understanding and control of instabilities in engineering systems, is one of the 18 international members newly elected. He is only the second Indian to be elected to the aerospace section of the NAE after Dr B N Suresh, then director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, ISRO, from 2003-07.

Prof Sujith is currently the D Srinivasan Chair Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras, and the Head of the Centre of Excellence for studying Critical Transitions in Complex Systems.

“This is a fantastic recognition for Prof. Sujith and really speaks to the kind of work that he has been able to do from IIT Madras. The Institute has also recently awarded his group a Center of Excellence (CoE) in Critical Transitions in Complex Systems and we expect world-class work from Prof. Sujith's group to continue to emerge from this CoE,” Prof. Raghunathan Rengaswamy, Dean (Global Engagement), IIT-M, said.

Prof. Sujith has been honoured with many esteemed awards earlier. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration (IIAV) and a Fellow of the Combustion Institute.

He is also a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and the Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) of the Technical University of Munich.

Prof R I Sujith received his undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering from IIT-M in 1988 and then graduated with an MS degree in 1990 and a PhD in 1994, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA.

He has over 390 technical publications (including 207 refereed journal publications), 14 patents and has written a book on Thermoacoustic Instability.