42nd Convocation:IIT Kanpur held its 42nd annual convocation on 3rd July 2010 with the Honorable Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh as the chief guest of the program. The institute honored him with a doctoral degree in Science. Dr. Singh is the fifth person to receive an honorary degree from the Institute, the other recipients were Prof. Norman C. Dahl (first KIAP leader), Sri Morarji Desai (former Prime Minister), Dr. P. K. Kelkar (former Director, IITK) and Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (former President).

In this year’s Convocation, 1195 students were awarded degrees. The Doctor of Philosophy was awarded to 131 scholars, and various medals and prizes were also awarded for meritorious performance. The President's Gold Medal was awarded to Nerella Tejaswi Venu Madhav of Physics and the Director's Gold Medal was awarded to Paraj Titum also of Physics. For details on all the awards and prizes please Click here.

The Prime Minister in his address, lauded the contributions made by IIT Kanpur in research and development. He emphasised that all the IITs should collaborate more with each other in research and also with the corporate sector to look for cost effective solutions for various problems. The Institute used this opportunity to launch some new projects. Two of them namely, the Solar Energy Research Experimental Station project and the Ganga Basin Project were inaugurated by the Prime Minister himself. The Solar plant set up by the Institute is expected to generate 850 KW of electricity for neighbouring villages like Nankari, Nara Mau, Baikunthpur, etc.

The Distinguished Teacher Award was instituted by IIT Kanpur in the year 2002 in order to acknowledge the contribution of the faculty to teaching. The following faculty members were awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award for the year 2010 on the occasion of Teachers’ Day:

Workshop on effective use of SCORM package and player in Brihaspati 2, was held from 19th - 20th June 2010. SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), is a set of specifications that, when applied to academic course content, produces small, reusable eLearning objects. The objectives of the workshop were to make the participants familiar with fundamental SCORM concepts, to give them a place to access pertinent SCORM resources along with adlnet.org and to enable them to design their courses in concordance with SCORM compliant learning management systems. For details visit: http://brihwiki.iitk.ernet.in/WebApp/QIP3/

National Workshop on Deployment and Use of NPTEL Courses was held from 12th - 13th July 2010.The aim of the workshop was to conduct course specific sessions by bringing together the faculty who developed the course with the teachers who are likely to use the lecture material. The disciplines covered in this workshop were Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. For details visit: http://nptel.iitk.ac.in/workshop/index.htm
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ChEmference2010 was held from 13th -14th July, 2010. The aim of the conference was to provide an opportunity to researchers, engineers, academicians as well as industrial professionals to come together and exchange novel ideas and share experiences. Chemical Engineering has come up with evolutionary and inspiring ideas like Reaction Engineering and Catalysis, Process Control and Optimization, Energy and Environment, Nanotechnology and many more. Thus ChEmference2010 provided a platform to celebrate and to share the innovations and advancements in Chemical Engineering and allied fields. For more details visit: http://www.iitk.ac.in/chemference2010/index.html

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Prof. A. K. Sood, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore gave a lecture titled Limitless Beauty of Soft Matter Physics on 24th July 2010. He is internationally renowned for his research on Raman and Brillouin scattering, ultrafast spectroscopy, transport measurements, dynamic light scattering, and rheology. The systems he has investigated include both hard and soft condensed matter. Prof. Sood is an elected fellow of INSA, IASc., NASI, TWAS (Trieste) and he has received numerous prestigious national and international awards.
In his talk he said that soft matter systems like colloidal suspensions, surfactant and lipid based gels, emulsions , paints, cosmetics, mayonnaise etc. are ubiquitous in nature and have come to be recognized as the paradigm of beautiful physics – both in equilibrium and non-equilibrium conditions. All these systems show unusual response to modest perturbations like shear, electric and magnetic fields. He took examples from his laboratory to illustrate the flow behavior of gels showing both order and chaos, and shear thickening and jamming. He also showed how the basic physics of colloids under an electric field has led to an application in ultra sensitive immunoassay.

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Prof. Sandeep Verma, Department of Chemistry, has been awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for the year 2010 in Chemical Science, for his significant contribution towards mimicking enzymes through metal-mediated systems and studying ordered peptide assemblies as artificial models of neurodegenerative protein aggregation. Prof. Verma did his PhD from the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA in 1994. He joined the Institute in the year 1997.

Dr. Kantesh Balani, Department of Material Science and Engineering has been awarded the INAE Young Engineer Award 2010.

Prof. V. Chandrasekhar, Department of Chemistry, has been awarded the Chemical Research Society of India Silver Medal for the year 2011 in recognition of his extensive and outstanding contributions to research in chemistry.

Prof. Debashish Chowdhury, Department of Physics, has been elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy.

Prof. Sanjay G. Dhande (Director, IITK), Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the Dewang Mehta Business School Award, for his outstanding contribution to higher education in India.

Prof. Kalyanmoy Deb, Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy.

Dr. S. Ganesh, Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, has been selected for the DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Award of the Department of Atomic Energy.

Dr. S. Mahesh, Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the INAE Young Engineer Award 2010.

Prof. Sanjay Mittal, Department of Aerospace Engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy.

Prof. R. N. Mukherjee, Department of Chemistry, has been awarded the Chemical Research Society of India Silver Medal for the year 2011 in recognition of his extensive and outstanding contributions to research in chemistry.

Dr. Shalabh, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, has been awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal (MMM) - National Award for the year 2008 by the Indian Econometric Society, India in 2010.

Prof. Vinod K. Singh, Department of Chemistry, has been elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy.

Prof. Y. D. Vankar, Department of Chemistry, has been awarded the prestigious J. C. Bose National Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India.

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New Heads of Departments

Prof. R. Ravishankar took over as the new head of the Physics Department on 9th August, 2010.

 

Prof. R. N. Mukherjee took over as the new head of the Chemistry Department on 9th August, 2010.

 

Prof. R. Sankararamakrishnan took over as the new head of the Biosciences and Bio-engineering Department on 30th August, 2010.

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Obituary

Prof. Satish Dinakar Joglekar passed away on 10th July, 2010. Prof. Joglekar was the Poonam and Prabhu Goel chair professor at IIT Kanpur. He was born in 1949. He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1975. He joined IIT Kanpur as a faculty member in 1981. Prof. Joglekar was one of our most distinguished theoretical physicists. He had a very deep understanding of Quantum Field Theory and Particle Physics and made many important contributions to the area.

Prof. Vishwas N. Kulkarni passed away on 24th July, 2010. He carried out his doctoral work in the Nuclear Physics Division of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, and obtained his doctoral degree from Marathwada University Aurangabad, in 1981. Prof. Kulkarni joined IIT Kanpur in 1986. He was a brilliant experimental physicist in the field of low energy particle accelerators and interdisciplinary research using energetic ion beams. He was one of the main architects in the establishing of the current world class facilities and research programmes at the Ion Beam Complex consisting of a 1.7 MeV Tandetron accelerator, a state-of-art Focused Ion Beam system and other complementary facilities for the development of modern and futuristic technology.

The Institute expresses its deepest condolences to the bereaved families of Prof. Joglekar and Prof. Kulkarni and prays for the peace of the departed souls.

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