SSB 2020 Prize awarded to 2 IIT B professors | Photo Credit: Representative Image
The 2020 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology was awarded to 10 teachers from across the country on Saturday. This award has been given to teachers for their important contributions in the field of science and technology. The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award was named after CSIR’s founding director and is a prestigious science and technology award in the country.
Professors from IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, Indian Statistical Institute and many other government research organizations have received the award. Professors Subhadeep Chatterjee, Vatsala Thirumalai in Biological Sciences, Jyotirmayee Dash and Subi Jacob George in Chemical Sciences, Abhijit Mukherjee and Suryendu Dutta in Earth, Atmospheric, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, Amol Arvindrao Kulkarni and Kinshuk Dasgupra and Hazgupra Engineering Sciences Rajat UK Anandavardhanan in Mathematical Sciences has received the award.
Of the 10 professors, two professors are from IIT Bombay who will receive the 2020 SSB Award: Professor Suryendu Dutta and Professor UK Anandavardhanan. With two IIT Bombay grantees, Prof. Subhasis Chaudhuri, Director of IIT Bombay said: “Over the years, IIT Bombay has invested heavily in recruiting a large number of very promising teachers and has done everything possible to train them with some of the excellent experimental and computational facilities. We are delighted that our researchers are being recognized for their high-quality research. “
One of the recipients, Prof. Suryendu Dutta, has received this award for his valuable contributions in the fields of organic geochemistry and molecular paleobiology. Professor Dutta’s innovation in the evolution of plant-derived terpenoids demonstrates how plant-derived organics are a major source of liquid hydrocarbons in many Indian oil basins.
Another recipient, Prof. UK Anandavardhanan on receiving the news of the award, said: “I am very happy to receive the news of the SSB Award. I work in an area where one investigates certain algebraic structures called “groups” with a view to “number theory” (called the Langlands program). I did my PhD. at Hyderabad University and postdoctoral research at TIFR, Mumbai. This is a great time to remember my teachers and mentors in these places. I moved to IIT Bombay in 2005, which has been a great place to work all these years with friendly and outstanding colleagues and students.
Meanwhile IIT Bombay has appointed MS Unnikrishnan as CE Executive Director of IITB-Monash Research AcademyOr on September 14, 2020. He would replace Professor Murali Sastry, who recently moved to the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University, Australia, for full-time research.
