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Eminent interdisciplinary scientist, Dr Subra Suresh, elected Honorary Fellow

Dr Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, USA, was recently elected to an Honorary Fellowship at St Hugh’s. A former director of the US National Science Foundation, Suresh is a distinguished engineer and scientist, and a member of three US National Academies — Medicine, Sciences and Engineering. He is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Before joining the NSF, Dr Suresh served as the dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research at MIT, which continues at Carnegie Mellon, into the properties of engineered and biological materials, and their connections to human diseases, has been published in more than 300 research articles, 25 patent applications and three books.

Dr Suresh has been elected to 15 academies based in the U.S., China, India, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain and France. He has been elected a fellow or honorary member of all the major materials research societies in the United States and India. He has been awarded 11 honorary doctorate degrees from institutions in the U.S., England, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, India and China. He was awarded the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honors, by the President of India in 2011.

Dr Suresh visited St Hugh’s in January 2015, to present a keynote speech at the 2015 Oxford Brain Mechanics Workshop, an event that brought together speakers from the various disciplines of brain mechanics research represented under the banner of the International Brain Mechanics and Trauma Lab (IBMTL) as well as representatives from Carnegie Mellon University. The workshop introduced the burgeoning strategic partnership between IBMTL and CMU’s ‘Brainhub’ project, to develop shared research into the study of brain function, injury and disease, demonstrating the growing need for world-class institutions to collaborate on complex issues.