Professor Bhaskar Ramamurthi has been appointed the new director of Indian Institute of Technology-Madras. President Pratibha Patil, in her capacity as Visitor of IIT-Madras had approved the appointment.Speaking on the changes he would like to bring in the institute, Ramamurthi said, “The institute will continue to focus on fundamental and translational research given the development imperative of the country and find solutions to the pressing problems facing society.”
He said that IITs have to elevate itself to the next stage in fundamental and translational research as both were required.
It would continue to pursue fundamental research contributing to global knowledge pool and leverage innovation and technology to produce visible success stories that would impact society in a positive way in sectors like education and agriculture.
“People are looking up to the IITs to improve the quality of their lives, especially in rural India,” added Ramamurthi.
He also pointed out that IITs need to enhance their research output. Most of the IITs have doubled the PhDs in the past five years but still the output was modest compared to that of China and doctoral scholars were required for industry and teaching.
Professor Bhaskar Ramamurthi is currently holding the post of Dean of Planning at IIT-Madras. He has done electrical engineering from IIT-M in 1980 and then went on to pursue his M.S and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined the faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT-M in 1986.
His research area involves modulation and coding for mobile communications, wireless communication networks and design and implementation of wireless local loop systems. He is also a founding member of the Telecommunications and Computer Networking Group (TeNeT) that has come up with several products like Rural ATM, medical diagnostic kit and Indic computing to name a few.
[Source: The Hindu]
