Subra Suresh is an Indian-born American engineer, materials scientist, and academic leader. He is currently Professor at Large at Brown University and Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and board member at the Villars Institute. He was Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT from 2007 to 2010 before being appointed as Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) by Barack Obama, where he served from 2010 to 2013. He was the president of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) from 2013 to 2017. Between 2018 and 2022, he was the fourth President of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where he was also the inaugural Distinguished University Professor. Société Générale, one of Europe’s leading financial services groups, announced in February 2024 that Subra Suresh has been appointed Chairman of the Group’s Scientific Advisory Council. Suresh was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2002, to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and to the Institute of Medicine (now 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 first and only university president to hold this distinction. He was the first Asian-born professor to lead any of the five schools at MIT and the first Asian-born scientist to lead the NSF. Suresh was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest honor accorded to a US scientist, by President Biden in a ceremony at the White House on 24 October 2023.
Early life and education Suresh was born in Mumbai, India, and graduated from high school in Tamil Nadu at the age of 15. In May 1977, he received his BTech 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, which awarded him an honorary doctor of science degree in 2022, and a ScD in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, during 1981-83.
Career
Brown University Suresh joined 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 7,800 times in scholarly publications, and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese and adopted as both a textbook and a reference work. Suresh returned to Brown University in September 2023 as Professor at Large to deliver periodic public lectures and to continue his research collaborations.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Suresh moved to MIT in 1993 as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. He led MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering from 2000 to 2006. He served as Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Dean of Engineering from 2007 to 2010, the first Asian-born to be appointed dean of any of MIT's schools, and held MIT faculty appointments in Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering, and Health Sciences and Technology. In his leadership roles at MIT, he helped to create new state-of-the-art laboratories, a new undergraduate curriculum in materials science and engineering, the MIT Transportation Initiative, and the Center for Computational Engineering; led MIT's efforts in establishing the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Center; and oversaw the recruitment of a record number of women faculty in engineering. As Dean of Engineering, he launched or oversaw a number of MIT's major international programs in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
