Chennai-born Suresh among only 9 non-Chinese named to CAS.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been named as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a rare and highly coveted distinction within the academic fraternity.
Membership in the CAS is China’s highest academic honor, bestowed on anyone in the fields of science and technology, regardless of their country of origin. Suresh, 57, was one of just nine people not of Chinese origin to be extended an invitation to join the CAS, which will have its annual meeting this May in the Chinese capital of Beijing.
In deciding to invite Suresh, the CAS noted his extensive contributions in the fields of scientific and engineering research, particularly in his work with the US National Science Foundation and his tenure with the Global Research Council.
Born in Chennai in 1956, Suresh earned his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He then came to the US and earned his master’s degree from Iowa State University, and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He did his post-doctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley, specifically the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In 1983, he joined Brown University as an assistant professor of engineering, eventually becoming an associate professor with tenure in 1986 and finally a full professor in 1989. He became the Dean of Engineering at MIT in 2007 after holding positions in the school’s departments of mechanical engineering, biological engineering, and others.
President Barack Obama nominated Suresh to be director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in June of 2010, for which he was unanimously confirmed. During his time as the head of the NSF, he guided the government-independent organization with an annual budget of $7 billion; during the 2012 fiscal year, Suresh was in charge of 300,000 employees, spread across 1,895 institutions.
He became Carnegie Mellon’s ninth president on July 1 of last year, and holds faculty positions in the departments of material science and engineering, engineering and public policy, biomedical engineering, and the school’s Heinz College, which is CMU’s public policy school.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com