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AWARDS AND HONOURS
YB WEB DESK. Dated: 12/3/2019 8:35:53 AM
Subra Suresh: Recipient of Padma Shri
Subra Suresh, a biological engineer and materials scientists was the first Asian born professor to lead any of the five schools at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the first Asian born scientist to lead the National Science Foundation (NSF). Subra Suresh was born on 1956 in Mumbai and graduated from high school in Tamil Nadu at the age of 15. In May 1977, he received his B. Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai, graduating with a First Class with Distinction. Suresh received a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University in 1979 and a Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, specialising in materials science. Suresh was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2002, to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and to the National Academy of Medicine in 2013. He is one of a very small number of Americans to be elected to three branches of the U.S. National Academies and the only university president to hold this distinction. After postdoctoral research at the University of California and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the faculty of engineering at Brown University in December 1983 as Assistant Professor of Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in July 1986 and to Professor in July 1989. In 1985, he was selected by the White House to receive the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He also received the 1982 Hardy Medal "for exceptional promise for a successful career in the broad field of metallurgy by a metallurgist under the age of 30" and the 1992 Ross Coffin Purdy Award from the American Ceramic Society for the best paper published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society in 1990. In 1991, his book ‘Fatigue of Materials’ was published by Cambridge University Press. According to Google Scholar it has been cited more than 5,300 times in scholarly publications and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese and adopted as both a textbook and a reference work.