Prof. Krishnan Balasubramanian

Institute Professor

Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras

Hon. President, ISNT

Prof. Krishnan Balasubramaniam has been involved in the field of Non-destructive evaluation for more than Thirty years with applications in the fields of maintenance, quality assurance, manufacturing, and design. He is currently Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and serves as the Head of the Centre for Non- Destructive Evaluation. He has over 480 technical publications (including 260 refereed journal papers), 30 patents filings and has directed 25 PHD student dissertations and 49 MS student theses. He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Madras (Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirappalli, India) in 1984. He then graduated from Drexel University, Philadelphia, from the department of Mechanical Engineering with a M.S. degree in 1986 and a Ph. D. in the year 1989. Before joining IIT in 2000, he was employed as an Associate Professor with the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at Mississippi State University.
In recognition for his outstanding contributions to research in the field of Nondestructive Evaluation, he was conferred with the ROY SHARPE PRIZE by the British Institute for NDT for the year 2012. He was also awarded the ISTEM Entrepreneurial Faculty Member Award for his entrepreneurial activities by Auburn University, USA in 2011 and the NATIONAL NDT AWARD 2010 by the Indian Society for NDT. He also was conferred the DRDO Academy Excellence Award for 2015. In 2018, he was bestowed with the prestigious ABDUL KALAM National Technology Innovation Fellowship by the Indian National Academy of Engineers and the Life Time Achievement Award by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He has been instrumental in the incubation of several startups including Dhvani Research, Playns Technologies, Detect Technologies, Maximl Labs, Trotix Robotics, HyperVerge, and Solinas Integrity. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Nondestructive Evaluation (ISNT) and as the South-east Asia Editor for the Journal of Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation (Taylor and Francis). He also serves as the Associate Editor of Ultrasonics (Elsevier) and Subject Editor for NDT&E International (Elsevier) and in the editorial board of the Journal of Structural Longevity (Techscience). He also is a board member of the World Federation of NDE Centers and the QNDE Scientific Advisor Committee. He is a Life Fellow of the Academia NDT International, Life Fellow of the Indian Society of Nondestructive Testing (ISNT) and a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineers.

Dr. Shyamsunder Mandayam

Co-Founder

Azeriri, Teralumen, Innomantra Consulting

A B.E (Metallurgy) from MS University Baroda and Ph.D from IIT, Kharagpur, he is a 36+ years experienced innovator, researcher, technologist and trainer with deep domain expertise in the multidisciplinary area of Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) of materials, components and structures as applied to Aerospace, Oil & Gas, Power, Renewables, Transportation and other industries. Passion to drive, lead and synergize between domains and adjacencies to enable best-in-class solutions using cutting edge technologies to industrial problems and challenges through collaborations, knowledge sharing and networking. Dr.Shyamsunder MT recently retired as a Principal Scientist in the NDE and Inspection domain at General Electric Company - Global Research after 20 years of R&D career working on several different topics related to material state awareness, defect detection and characterization, inspection reliability sensor design, inspection analytics, etc in advanced electromagnetic NDE ( eddy current, microwave, terahertz), Ultrasound and Radiographic NDE, Automation and Robotics/Drones for Industrial Inspection for challenging applications in the industry. Prior to this he worked at IGCAR, Kalpakkam for 16 years. Worked extensively in the development of new and Advanced NDE / Inspection techniques, driving the vision and prepared roadmaps for next generation in the core area of NDE ans inspection to keep GE in the forefront of this domain with respect to the competition and the prevailing state-of-the-art globally. At IGCAR, Kalpakkam he was instrumental in Developing, Validating and Transitioning the state-of-the-art technologies in NDE and inspection for quality control and asset integrity management of Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) and Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs) including development of new sensors, inspection methodologies, analytics and adaptability and deployment in highly radioactive environments. Adopting the developed expertise to other strategic sectors of defence and space as well as other industries in the power, petrochemical and aerospace sector needing advanced technologies for their lifecycle management. He is currently mentoring, advising and incubating a few start-ups and pioneering the adoption of NDE 4.0 and Inspection through digital transformation (IoT, Digital Twins, AR/VR, Analytics using AI and ML, ….). He is passionate about Industry- Academia interactions and working towards enabling the same. He has 12 patents and 160+ papers in various journals, books and proceedings and delivered 90+ invited talks.

Prof. Balaji Srinivasan

Dept. of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras

Prof. Balaji Srinivasan has been with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai as a faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Balaji Srinivasan obtained his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of New Mexico, USA. He subsequently worked as a Senior Development Scientist at Corning Incorporated, USA, where he led technology development efforts related to 3D Optical Cross-connects and Channel Selectable Tunable Filters. He has research interests span the development of active and passive optical components/ subsystems for distributed fiber optic sensors and fiber lasers that include thermal stability of Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) and FBG- based sensors, high power fiber lasers and amplifiers, nonlinear interactions in optical fibers including Raman and Brillouin scattering, optical instrumentation for fiber characterization and sensing. Prof. Srinivasan has co- authored more than 140 journal and international conference publications as well as 3 book chapters. He also has 7 patents to his credit (5 more pending). He has successfully executed or currently investigating 24 research projects worth over INR 17 Crores (USD 2.6M) of funding, resulting in the development of 6 technologies, 3 of which have been transferred to industry for commercialization. He was awarded Collegiate Inventor Award (2000) organized by National Inventors Hall of Fame for significant Inventions among US college students, New Focus Student Award (1999) organized by Optical Society of America (OSA) for research excellence, presentation prowess and leadership in the optics community, Outstanding Graduate Student in EECE Award (1999). He has served as Member of the Photonics Working Group of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITy), Government of India, Steering Committee of the National Photonics Fellowship, the Editorial Board of the Springer Photonic Network Communications Journal, and as a Chair for the 2012 International Conference on Fiber Optics and Photonics. Prof. Balaji presently serves in the Editorial Board of the prestigious Optics Express journal, and is one of the Directors of Unilumen Photonics Pvt Ltd, a fiber laser company incubated by IIT Madras. For his professional accomplishments, he has been awarded Senior Membership in OSA.

Prof. Siddhartha Panda

Dr. S. Sampath Chair Professor

Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Kanpur

Prof. Siddhartha Panda has been involved in the areas of transport phenomena, reaction engineering, materials processing and micro/nano fabrication leading to the technology development of chemical sensors - utilizing both printable flexible electronics based platforms as well as conventional silicon electronics based platforms.. He is currently Dr. S. Sampath Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Prior to this he worked as Staff/ Advisory Engineer, IBM Semiconductor R&D Center, Hopewell Junction, New York. He obtained his undergraduate degree in B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur in 1992. He then graduated from University of Cincinnati, from the department of Chemical Engineering with a M.S. degree in 1995 and a Ph. D. from University of Houston in the year 1999. He was conferred IBM Invention Achievement Award (2002), Jeet Bindra Research Fellowship (2020-2013), Golden Jubilee Chair Professor on Entrepreneurship and Innovation (2018). He has 68 granted patents in India and abroad (US, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan etc.) and 85+ papers in various journals, books and proceedings.