ALUMNI NEWSMAKERS
- DR. Bikramjit Basu
| Wednesday, May 11, 2005 |
DR. Bikramjit Basu, Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, has been invited to join the editorial board of 'Trends in Biomaterials and Artificial Organs' of the Society for Biomaterials and artificial Organs (India). This is the only journal published from India in the area of biomaterials.
Recently Dr. Basu was selected for award of the INSA Medal for Young Scientist. |
- K V Jayakumar(MT/PHD/CE/82/93)
| Monday, February 07, 2005 |
| Prof K V Jayakumar(MT/PHD/CE/82/93) has been invited as member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Agricultural Engineering Society of SriLanka and has also taken over as Professor-in-Charge of Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy, NationalInstitute of Technology Warangal. |
- Dr Udai P Singh (BT/CE/72)
| Monday, February 07, 2005 |
| Dr Udai P Singh (BT/CE/72) was given the inaugural Outstanding Engineering Manager Award at the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
San Francisco Section Annual Awards Dinner Meeting for excellence and significant contributions in the field of CE. He is the VP, CH2M HILL and has contributed in
the areas of environmental engineering & hazardous waste management & is currently the Program Manager on a US $300 million EPA Region 9 Superfund Contract. |
- Hargovind Sharma (BT/ME/75)
| Monday, February 07, 2005 |
| Hargovind Sharma (BT/ME/75) Dy General Manager (Elect), ONGC at Chankheda, Ahemdabad has developed
a system by which the stand alone pumps (called SRP, nearly 600 nos. in his region) dig out oil independently at the sites totally unmanned; performance details and defects are coordinated by a PC and cell. His achievement has been recognized by the ONGC Chairman and MD. He was given the Excellence Award and special cash prize of Rs one Lakh on January 26, 05 at Dehradun. |
- Anil K Rajvanshi (BT/MT/ME/72/74)
| Monday, February 07, 2005 |
| Anil K Rajvanshi (BT/MT/ME/72/74) Director Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) Pune has
been short listed for the Energy Globe Award, called
the Oscar of Energy : www.energyglobe.info |
- Manoj Kumar Joshi (BT/CHE/72)
| Monday, February 07, 2005 |
| Manoj Kumar Joshi (BT/CHE/72) has been appointed as Director (Technical) on the Board of Engineers India Ltd, an Indian PSU and a Premier Consultancy Organization in Asia. |
- Viney P Aneja (BT/CHE/71)
| Monday, February 07, 2005 |
| Viney P Aneja (BT/CHE/71) has been selected to serve as a member of the USDA's Agricultural Air Quality Task Force for a term of two years. This is a very high honor and a challenge in providing advice and council to the Secretary USDA on protecting the country's agricultural air quality and environment; and to help shape future science & research and policy for effective management of US Agriculture. |
- India's tech elite thrive at home and in the U.S.
| Wednesday, March 30, 2005 |
Jim Landers India's tech elite thrive at home and in the U.S.
09:28 PM CST on Sunday, March 27, 2005
By JIM LANDERS / The Dallas Morning News WASHINGTON
India's elite colleges the seven Indian Institutes of Technology are holding their alumni bash in Washington this spring. That sounds like a geography mixup. Texas A & M system grads wouldn't have their big fete in Tokyo unless, perhaps, most of them were working in Japan. It turns out that tens of thousands of the Indian Institutes of Technology grads are working in the United States. They call themselves IITians (eye-eye-tee-ans). And their story is worth pondering in the debate about whether outsourcing technology jobs is good, bad, inevitable or dangerous. The IITians are survivors of what may be the world's toughest entrance exam. About 100,000 high schoolers take it, but just 2,000 are accepted.
Graduates often come to the United States to get advanced degrees and stay to work technology jobs under H-1B visas where employers assert a shortage of skilled Americans. Many then start businesses of their own, hiring thousands of Americans but also using the Internet to send work back to India. They were criticized when they left India for draining brains away from a country that badly needs their skills. They were criticized in the United States for taking jobs from Americans. Today the brains flow back and forth, both literally and, thanks to the Internet, virtually. And the IITians are caught up in the outcry against outsourcing. "These are transnational individuals who have roots in more than one place, who I think are going to lead this global world," said anthropology professor Caroline Brettell of Southern Methodist University, who has studied the Indian community in Dallas. "That's just the nature of the world, and we've got to get with the program." Raj Menon of Plano, who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, runs the 350-member North Texas IIT alumni association. He came here to pursue a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Texas in Austin and stayed to work at Dallas Trinity Consultants. Business model He became a U.S. citizen and, with three other IIT alumni, started Intigma. At its peak, the software firm had 10 employees in Dallas and 60 in Pune, a city east of Bombay. The business failed when the Internet bubble broke, but the business model continues. "Not just for software development, but for outsourcing all kinds of business processes engineering, accounting, finance," Mr. Menon said. "It's a purely economic proposition." The IEEE-USA sees that proposition from the perspective of American electrical engineers who have lost jobs. "I don't think the problem is for the American companies. The problem is for the American workers, the American engineers," said Ron Hira, an IEEE-USA vice president. "When American semiconductor companies were losing market share to the Japanese in the 1980s, they went to Washington and lobbied for protection. ... They got $500 million in research and development subsidies. Now these same companies are going overseas to do R & D. "If we outsource our innovation, that was supposed to be our ace in the hole," he said. Mr. Hira says the model represented by the IIT graduates has gone from "brain drain" to "brain circulation," but public policies haven't changed to reflect that. Here and there IITians say they've created jobs and wealth in both the United States and India. They started firms such as Sun Microsystems, Juniper Networks and Cirrus Logic that employ thousands of Americans. Sudhakar Shenoy is co-chair of this year's IIT alumni conference. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of IMC Inc., a Reston, Va., company that employs nearly 500 people in the United States and 100 in Pune. "We hope to get up to eight or nine hundred employees here in the U.S., and maybe two to three hundred in India by the end of the year," Mr. Shenoy said. IMC has done work in India that Mr. Shenoy says he would not have done with his U.S. team. The company spent $500,000 to have Indian programmers design software for genetic research that runs on massive parallel computers in Virginia. The package would have cost $3 million in the United States. It is cutting problem solving from three weeks to five minutes for some clients. "Would I have done it without the Indian facility? Absolutely not," Mr. Shenoy said. "I could not afford a $3 million risk." At the same time, Mr. Shenoy argues the IITians have done great things for America. "These people employ over 170,000 in the U.S., and they're not all Indians. They're local people," he said.
E-mail jlanders@dallasnews.com |
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