Prof. Tarun Kant has been an institute chair professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay since December 2009. He was elected a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 1999, the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2004, the Indian National Science Academy in 2007 and the National Academy of Sciences, India in 2011. He is the first civil engineer to be elected to all four national academies, and the fourth civil engineer to be elected to the two national science academies (INSA and IASc).
Prof. Kant received his BSc degree from Allahabad University in 1962, B.Tech degree in Civil Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1967 and M.Tech in Civil Engineering, specializing in structural engineering, from IIT Kanpur in 1969. He earned his doctorate in 1977 while working as a lecturer at IIT Bombay. Prof. Kant has been a visiting professor at the University of Wales, Swansea (1979-82), the University of Cambridge (1993) and the University of California, Los Angeles (2005).
A recipient of the Burmah-Shell Best Paper Prize, Prof. Kant was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust (UK) Scholarship in 1979 and the 1992-93 European Commission (EC) Senior Faculty Exchange Fellowship by the Government of India. Prof. Kant was awarded the 2006 Professor H.H. Mathur Award for Excellence in research in Applied Sciences by IIT Bombay in 2007 in recognition of his work in the mechanics of composite materials and structure; he also received the 2009 IIT Roorkee-Khosla National Award for lifetime achievement in the field of engineering. IIT Bombay conferred upon Prof. Kant its 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Prof. Kant established a research school of computational structural mechanics at IIT Bombay. He served two terms as president of the Indian Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (1999 and 2000), founded the Indian Association for Computational Mechanics (IndACM) and the Indian Association for Structural Engineering (IASE) and organized the biennial International Congress on Computational Mechanics and Simulation and Structural Engineering Convention congresses in India. He was an INSA-nominated member of the National Committee of International Union of Theoretical & Applied Mechanics for two three-year terms: July 2000-June 2003 and January 2008-December 2011, and was a member of the IUTAM General Assembly until 2012. Prof. Kant is also a chair and member of the engineering and technology sections of INSA and IASc, respectively.
