Kris Gopalakrishnan names third Distinguished Chair in brain research

Current chair is in honour of C R Muthukrishnan, retired Professor from Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras

IIT Madras alumnus and co-founder of Infosys, Kris Gopalakrishnan has named the third Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research after C R Muthukrishnan, retired Professor from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Gopalakrishnan had earlier set up three chairs in computational brain research at IIT Madras, with an endowment of Rs 10 crore each.

The three chairs created at IIT-M focus on computing aspects - architecture & model of the brain, including the memory/ processor relationship and neuromorphic computing. The first Chair was endowed in December 2014 as the Prof Mahabala Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research and has since been occupied by Dr Partha Mitra, from Cold Spring Harbor Lab, New York.

The second Chair was endowed in April 2015 as the N R Narayana Murthy Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research and is occupied by Mriganka Sur, from MIT, Cambridge. The third Chair, which has now been named, was endowed in July 2015 and is occupied by Anand Raghunathan from Purdue University, West Lafayette, US.

Muthukrishnan is currently Advisor, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, and is fully engaged in faculty development, motivation and attitude building for students, and in quality improvement of teaching-learning. He has served as Consulting Advisor, TCS, and was in the Tamil Nadu IT Task Force 1998-2001. He has also served as President of the Computer society of India 2000-2002, as Indo-French Scientific Council Member in 2000-2005, and as Director on the Boards of Tidel Park and Indian Bank.