IITs at Delhi, Madras, Mandi and Indore get new directors

The government has appointed  new Directors in four IITSs. Accordingly, Prof V. Kamakoto has been appointe as Director, IIT Madras, Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT, Delhi, Laxmidhar Behera, Director, IIT< Mandi and  Suhas Joshi to be the Director, IIT, Imdore. Prof Kamakoti will be succeeding Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi, who is stepping down after completing two terms. An Alumnus of IIT Madras, Prof. Kamakoti, is currently the Associate Dean for Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research (ICSR), IIT Madras. He is also a member of the National Security Advisory Board, Government of India. Professor V Kamakoti also  designed India’s first indigenously-developed microprocessor 'SHAKTI'.

Prof Banerjee was associated with the Department of Energy Sciences & Engineering, IIT Bombay. He has been involved in setting up a Megawattscale Solar Thermal Power Testing, Simulation, Research Facility sponsored by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and is the faculty advisor of Team Shunya - India’s first student team in the Solar Decathlon 2014 Europe finals that involves designing and constructing a fully functional Solar house.

IIT, Mandi's new Director, Prof Laxmidhar Behera, is an electrical engineering professor at IIT Kanpur. He will be succeeding Prof Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi, who steps down after completing ewo terms. Prof Behera had worked for BITS Pilani and as a scientist at the National Research Centre of Information Technology, Germany. He heads the Intelligent Systems and Control Laboratory at IIT Kanpur and extensively focuses on developing automation solutions to industrial and domestic problems.

Prof Joshi is the Rahul Bajaj Chair Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Bombay. Serving as the Dean, Alumni and Corporate Relations of IIT-B, Prof Joshi is a fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Sciences. Now he will  takeover as new Director of IIT Indore. Joshi worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Tech., USA in 2002 and served as a visiting faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA in 2005-06. He was also the head of mechanical engineering department, IIT Bombay from 2014 to 2017.