Dr. Animangsu Ghatak, a graduate from the department (PhD, 2003, with Professor Manoj Chaudhury) has been elected to the Indian National Academy of Engineering as a Fellow. The Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) comprises India’s most distinguished engineers, engineer-scientists and technologists covering the entire spectrum of engineering disciplines, and functions as an apex body to promote and advance the practice of engineering and technology and the related sciences and disciplines in India. The total number of members (fellows) of the Academy is limited to 1,000. Each year, less than 50 new members (fellows) and 4 or 5 foreign members are elected to the Academy by “peer” committees in recognition of their personal achievements in “Engineering” which are of exceptional merit and have demonstrated distinctive eminence in the new and developing fields of technology.
Dr. Ghatak is currently the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. In this position, Dr. Ghatak has full operational responsibility for managing all aspects of the functioning of the department.
Dr. Ghatak received his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Lehigh in 2003 under the supervision of Professor Manoj Chaudhury. Subsequently, he pursued a postdoctoral position at Cambridge University, UK and Harvard University, USA studying instability and fracture of soft materials.
He joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2004 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009. Dr. Ghatak has received the Young Engineer Award of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2006, Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2010, and has published in Science, Advanced Materials, Physical Review Letters, Proc. National Academy of Sciences, Langmuir and Soft Matter. In 2014, Dr. Ghatak was named a Gireesh Jankinath Chair Professor in Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. His research interests are in the areas of Adhesion, friction and fracture at soft interfaces, locomotion of soft objects, flow through microfluidic channels. Indian National Academy of Engineering new Fellows for 2018 press release