Ratan Tata, 8 Indian-Americans in US engineering academy

Leading Indian industrialist Ratan N. Tata has been inducted into the prestigious US National Academy of Engineering in the US for his "outstanding contributions to industrial development in India and the world".

Tata, chairman emeritus of the Tata Group, was inducted as one of 11 new foreign associates of the private, independent, non-profit institution that provides independent advice to the US federal government on matters involving engineering and technology.

Besides Tata, eight Indian-Americans were among 69 new elected members taking the total US membership to 2,250 and the number of foreign associates to 211.

Addressing the annual meeting of the group here Sunday, NAE President C.D. Mote Jr. lamented that talented engineering workforce was not being given desired priority attention in the US.

At just four percent, the percentage of US engineering graduates among all its graduates is 1/3 of the European average (13 percent) and 1/6 of the Asian (India, Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore) competitor average of 23 percent, he said.

As part of its efforts to push its global reach, NAE has started bilateral "Frontiers of Engineering" programmes with India, Germany, Japan, China, and the EU and a new one with Brazil is scheduled for 2014, he said.

The new Indian-American members are:

Anant Agarwal, president, edX (online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University) for contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures.

Murty P. Bhavaraju, senior consultant, PJM Interconnection, Norristown, Pennsylvania for probabilistic reliability evaluation tools for large electric power systems.

Ashok J. 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.

Ganesh Kailasam,, research and development vice president and global research and development director, performance materials division, Dow Chemical Co., Freeport, Texas for development of processes for production of high-performance polymers including polyetherimides.

Vijay Kumar, UPS foundation professor, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia for contributions in cooperative robotics, networked vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles, and for leadership in robotics research and education.

Bal Raj Sehgal, emeritus professor of nuclear power safety, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden for contributions to predicting accident behaviour of nuclear reactor systems.

Pradeep S. Sindhu, vice chairman, chief technical officer, and founder, Juniper Networks, Sunnyvale, California for contributions to technology and commercialization of Internet Protocol routing.

Krishna (Kris) P. Singh, president and chief executive officer, Holtec International, Marlton, New Jersey for engineering and business leadership for increased power plant efficiency and improved safety of spent nuclear fuel storage worldwide.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)