Odisha’s Prof Laxmidhar Behera Appointed New Director of IIT Mandi
New Delhi: An Odia educationist, Prof Laxmidhar Behera, has been appointed new director of Indian Institutes of Technology, Mandi. He is among the four new directors appointed to the IITs at Delhi, Madras and Indore.
The others are Prof Rangan Banerjee of IIT Bombay has been appointed as next director of IIT Delhi, Prof V Kamakoti of IIT Madras has been elevated as director of the same institute and Prof Suhas Joshi of IIT Bombay have been appointed as directors of IIT Indore.
Prof Behera, the Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair Professor in IIT Kanpur Department of Electrical Engineering, specialises in robotics and AI.
“During the interview, I had shared my plan to focus on certain areas such as climate controlled agriculture, bioenergy, robotics and AI and cognitive science. My focus will also be on improving the ranking of IIT Mandi,” said Prof Behera, an alumni of NIT-Rourkela, while speaking to Indian Express.
During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, he ran a community kitchen on the campus to feed over 1000 street children daily.
Born in Talsara village under Bahanaga block, Behera had left Odisha in 1991 for higher education. After completing M Tech from NIT Rourkela, he got a PhD from IIT Delhi. Before joining IIT Kanpur in 2001, he had worked for BITS Pilani and as a scientist at National Research Centre of Information Technology, Germany.
Prof Kamakoti, a member of the National Security Advisory Board, teaches at IIT Madras’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Kamakoti helped design India’s first indigenously developed microprocessor SHAKTI.
Prof Banerjee, a Forbes Marshall Chair Professor in IIT Bombay, is a B Tech (Mechanical) from the same institute. Later, he obtained a PhD (Mechanical Engineering), also from IIT Bombay.
The search-cum-selection panel constituted for this purpose had interviewed the shortlisted candidates in September last year.
Prof Joshi is the Rahul Bajaj Chair Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Bombay. Serving as the Dean, Alumni and Corporate Relations of IIT-B, Prof Joshi is a fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Sciences.
IIT Madras had topped the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings 2021 in the engineering category. IIT Delhi was placed second, IIT Indore 10th, while IIT Mandi had the 31st rank.
The outgoing directors of IIT Delhi Prof Ramgopal Rao and IIT Madras Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi were serving on extension, with their five-year tenures having ended in April 2021.
IIT Mandi and IIT Indore were being led by acting directors Prof Ajit Kumar and Prof Neelesh Kumar Jain, respectively, stated reports.
