2 Indian American Professors Among 13 Jefferson Science Fellows for 2020-2021
- Supriyo Bandyopadhyay of Virginia Commonwealth University and Surajit Sen of State University of New York at Buffalo are among the honorees.
Two Indian Americans are among 13 academic scientists, engineers, and physicians from U.S. institutions of higher learning, chosen as the 16th class of Jefferson Science Fellows (JSF). The program was established in 2003 as an initiative of the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State. Each Fellow will spend one year at the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for an on-site assignment in Washington, D.C., that may also involve extended stays at U.S. foreign embassies and/or missions.
The 2020-2021 class of Jefferson Science Fellows includes Supriyo Bandyopadhyay of Virginia Commonwealth University and Surajit Sen of State University of New York at Buffalo. Bandyopadhyay, the Commonwealth Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, directs the Quantum Device Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Bandyopadhyay’s research is in spintronics, straintronics, energy-efficient computing and nanoscale self-assembly. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India; M.S. degree from the Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue, Assistant and Associate Professor at University of Notre Dame, Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and now Commonwealth Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University with a courtesy appointment as Professor of Physics.
Bandyopadhyay was named Virginia’s Outstanding Scientist by Virginia’s Governor Terence R. McAuliffe in 2016. His alma mater, the IIT Kharagpur, named him a distinguished alumnus in 2016.Other awards include Distinguished Scholarship Award, Lifetime Achievement Award, College of Engineering Research Award, and the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award, among others. Last year, he received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) “Pioneer in Nanotechnology” award. An author and co-author of several papers and textbooks, Bandyopadhyay, is a Fellow of IEEE, American Physical Society, Institute of Physics (UK), the Electrochemical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Sen joined the physics faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he has been a full professor since 2006. He holds a B.Sc (Hons) from Presidency College, Calcutta and a PhD from The University of Georgia. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and Michigan State University before joining SUNY Buffalo. His research is on nonequilibrium processes and nonlinear dynamical systems as realized in nature and in social contexts. He is deeply interested in raising awareness about science and math in children and youth from the underserved communities.
Sen is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the American Association of the Advancement of Science and has been a Fulbright-Nehru Dr. Sen is an editor of the journal Granular Matter and an editorial board member of journals Modern Physics Letters B and International Journal of Modern Physics B. His university service includes chairing the promotion and tenure process in arts and sciences at Buffalo, being involved in human rights of scientists through the APS and in structuring bi-national science collaboration programs between individual academics. He is a past two-term president of the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association and a former member of the executive committee of the Forum on International Physics of the APS.