Profile of the Week

Professor Ramanath received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1997. His PhD thesis work won him a Materials Research Society Graduate Student Award. After a brief stint in the electronics industry, he joined Rensselaer in 1998 as an assistant professor, was promoted to full professorship in 2006, and was named John Tod Horton Professor in 2013. His research focuses on developing a fundamental understanding of structure-processing-property relationships in molecularly-tailored inorganic nanomaterials and heterointerfaces for energy and electronics applications. He has co-authored more than 170 journal articles (Google Scholar h-index 50, 9600+ citations), one book chapter, holds 9 US patents, has delivered over 220 invited/plenary/keynote talks worldwide, and has organized several international symposia and workshops for MRS, AVS and TMS. He is a co-founder of ThermoAura Inc, and was the Director of the NY State Center for Future Energy Systems and an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology. Ramanath is a Fellow of Materials Research Society (2018), American Physical Society (2016), and American Vacuum Society (2013), and a senior member of IEEE (2018). Select awards include Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award (2013), Brahm Prakash Chaired Professorship, India (2012), Rensselaer Team Excellence Award (2013); Rensselaer Research Excellence Award (junior faculty-2002, senior faculty-2012), Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2004), Bergman Young Scientist Award, Israel (2003), NSF CAREER Award (2000), IBM Research Partnership Award (2000-2013). Visiting appointments/sabbaticals include RWTH, Aachen University, Germany; MaxPlanck-Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany; National Institute of Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan; IISc, Bangalore, India; University of Wollongong, Australia; PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, Coimbatore, India. Ramanath is a polyglot whose hobbies include performing and teaching Indian classical music (live and TV performances in the US, Australia, Germany, and India), Indic culture, philosophy, chants and devotional hymns, cricket, multilingual puns, poetry in 5 different languages, and teaching spoken Sanskrit.