US engineers' body selects Ratan Tata as member

India's leading industrialist Ratan Tata will be formally inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in the US tomorrow for his "outstanding contributions" to industrial development in India and the world over.

Tata, chairman emeritus of the Tata Group, one of India's largest and oldest conglomerate, will be inducted as a Foreign Associate, the National Academy of Engineering said in a statement.

Founded in 1964, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is a private, independent, nonprofit institution that provides engineering leadership in service to the nation.

The NAE this year has elected 69 new members and 11 foreign associates, thus bringing the total US membership to 2,250 and the number of foreign associates to 211.

University of Southern California President C L Max Nikias congratulated Tata on his induction.

"It is a great pleasure to congratulate Ratan Tata as he joins the National Academy of Engineering," said Nikias.

"His accomplishments as a visionary leader and business innovator are recognised and studied throughout the world. The revolutionary products he has steered to market have redefined 21st century engineering and manufacturing paradigms, and created a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity that has benefited people all over the globe," he said.

Eight Indian-Americans also had been elected to the body earlier, considered among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.

Anant Agarwal, president, edX (online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University) and professor electrical engineering and computer science department in Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been elected for his contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures.

Murty P Bhavaraju senior consultant, has been elected for probabilistic reliability evaluation tools for large electric power systems; and Ashok Gadgil, director and senior scientist, environmental energy technologies division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for engineering solutions to the problems of potable water and energy in underdeveloped nations.

Other Indian-Americans to be inducted into the Academy are Ganesh Kailasam, from Dow Chemical, Vijay Kumar, from University of Pennsylvania and Bal Raj Sehgal, emeritus professor of nuclear power safety, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; Pradeep Sindhu and Krishna P Singh too had made it to the list.