Research I Foundation

The Foundation is supported by Mr. N.R. Narayana Murthy, an IITK alumnus. The Research-I Foundation grant is utilized to enhance the overall research output and research environment of the CSE department. During the 2021-2022 financial year, this fund is utilized in the following ways -

1. The department faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, and students have been publishing in the top-tier conferences such as CAV, ICSE, ISCA, AAAI, AISTATS, ASPLOS, ICML, IJCAI, ICCM, ACL, ICASSP, FOCS, etc. The Research-I Foundation funds are used to support conference travel (no travel in the last financial year because all conferences were held virtually) and registration for presenting accepted papers at these international conferences. This activity has significantly improved the visibility of the department among the international CS research community.


2. PhD students who have spent over five years and are yet to finish their theses, have been helped with a small stipend from the Research-I Funds.


3. The department has been able to attract brilliant new faculty members by offering them extra top-up salary on top of their regular institute salary through the Research-I Fund for the first three years of their initiation in the department. This particularly helped recruiting faculty members coming from abroad and the Department has been quite successful in the recruitment of such faculty members.


4. A small portion of the Research-I fund has also been used to improve the computational infrastructure of the department. This infrastructure is used for teaching and conducting research.

Department Excellence Fund

Excellence Fund has been created in each academic department and Inter-Disciplinary Programs (IDPs) to provide more non-governmental financial support from alumni and well-wishers. The funds are raised by the respective departments and a matching grant on such donations is given from IITK (General Corpus) for the utilization to each department and IDPs to conduct various activities and to encourage fund raising programs

The Rao Ramela Fund

This Fund is used for the payment of registration fee of nine faculty members and six PhD students toward participation in the REACH symposium. Among the nine faculty members, four were scheduled to speak at the symposium. They are Prof. Sandeep Shukla, Prof. Piyush Rai, Prof. Swaprava Nath, and Prof. Pramod Subramanyan. Another five faculty members were scheduled to attend the symposium. They are Prof. Debadatta Mishra, Prof. Preeti Malakar, Prof. Ashutosh Modi, Prof. Hamim Zafar, and Prof. Swarnendu Biswas. REACH symposium is an interdisciplinary summit among multiple departments of IIT Kanpur to encourage faculty members and PhD students to take up interdisciplinary research. It was planned to be held from 29-31 March 2020 in Lucknow. The REACH symposium could not be held due to Coronavirus pandemic.

Dr. N. R.Narayana Murthy Fund

Considering increasing expenses on academic activities in different departments and less support from the government, IITK created Departmental Excellence Fund in each academic department and Inter-Disciplinary Program. These funds are utilized for various academic activities including support to faculty and students attending national/international conferences, organizing seminars, etc. NRNM Endowment was created by Dr. Narayana Murthy and the endowment is utilized by different departments and Inter-Disciplinary Programs for their various activities.

Students may kindly see this link https://iitk.ac.in/dora/office-order

The Foundation for Chemical Engineering Department

The Department continues to recognize & appreciate the kind support of Chevron Corporation through the setting up of The Foundation for Chemical Engineering with a corpus in excess of Rs. 100 lakhs. The utility of the funds received from the interest of The Foundation has a significant impact in assisting the department in conducting various activities and planning for the future. The various activities proposed were:

1. Post-graduate students who stay beyond their specified dates of assistantships for research related reasons
2. Students and faculty to attend conferences where they are presenting papers
3. Creation of Common room facilities for students.
4. Increasing the Student-Faculty interaction and Faculty-Faculty get-togethers
5. Usage of high-end experimental facilities in the Institute that require usage charges
6. Fellowships open for all Chemical Engineering Faculty members
7. Faculty members to spend time at Industry.

1. Purchasing high value spare part & maintenance contracts for instruments housed in the Post Graduate Research Laboratory, which is a departmental experimental research facility for graduate students.
2. We have also encouraged and funded the usage of institute high end facilities by our faculty and students for their research work.
3. We have supported many 'open air' outdoor 'happy hours' student gatherings utilizing this fund as funds in this project are not sufficient to create a common room facility.
4. Fellowship support to senior graduate students who stay beyond their specified dates of assistantships for research related reasons.
5. Travel support and reimbursement of conference registration fees for graduate students of the department.
6. Facilitate ways that promote frequent faculty-student interaction: Research Scholar's Day is an annual event (held onMarch 26, 2022) celebrated by the PhD students of the Chemical Engineering Department. As part of the program, the students interact with invited expert researchers and also get opportunity to showcase their own research work through posters and presentations to the attendees, which helps in recognition, feedback, collaborations, etc. The purpose of the Research Scholar’s day is to promote research awareness among the new postgraduate students. Usually, all faculty members of our department attend it, which promotes strong student-faculty interaction.

Due to the pandemic & its widespread effect of curtailed interactions, the department was unable to undertake several activities pertaining to points (vi) & (vii) in the year 2021-2022.

Prof. Ashoke Sen Endowment

Prof. Ashoke Sen (MSC 2/PHY/1978) contributed Rs. 10 lakhs towards modernization of the Seminar Room of Physics Department and dedicated the same in the honor of Professor Amal K Raychaudhuri in the year 2015-16. During 2019-20, Department of Physics utilized the interest earnings of the fund towards payment for purchase of green chalk board and repairing of its sliding system.

National Information Centre of Earthquake Engineering

The 12th National Workshop for UG students of architecture was held in IIT Kanpur from 1-7 July, 2019 in which 60 students who had completed six semesters of studies in their respective architecture programmes, from 14 institutes representing 12 cities from all over India particitated in this 7-day workshop. Ms. Annanya Jha, National Institute of Technology, Raipur, and Ms. Sayad Kashaf Fatima, Dr. D.Y. Patil College of Architecture, Navi Mumbai secured first positions.A 10-day (June 27-July 06, 2019) workshop on Earthquake Engineering Literature Survey was conducted in which postgraduate students from engineering colleges across India participated. To spread the message of seismic safety among school children, who are the future builders of the country, NICEE has been organizing Inter-school Quiz based on its most popular publication, Earthquake Tips since 2009. This year there was an overwhelming response from schools for registration for the quiz.

Forty-eight schools from thirty cities participated in the quiz. The schools were given 50 copies of the Tips, to be used for selecting a team of four participants from each school from Class VIII to Class XI. In the final round of the quiz held on January 26, 2020 seven schools participated-DAV, Ludhiana; Centre Point School, Nagpur; DPS Gandhidham; Nehru World School, Ghaziabad; Emerald Heights International School, Indore; Smt. Sulochanadevi Singhania School, Thane and Sheiling House School, Kanpur.participating