Dancing with Cells, Surfing the Laminar Flow

Ahead of Satish Dhawan’s birth anniversary on 25 September, his daughter Jyotsna writes about her childhood on the IISc campus, life beyond, and her father’s indelible presence In the 1960s, while our parents (mostly fathers) worked away in labs and offices, libraries and classrooms, the children of IISc staff (mostly barefoot and unsupervised) explored that […]

Remembering SR Valluri

A tribute to the life and achievements of the IISc alumnus who left his mark on Indian aerospace engineering The name of Dr Sitaram Rao Valluri, who passed away on 23 January 2019, aged 94, will forever be linked with the National Aeronautical Laboratory (NAL; now National Aerospace Laboratories). Valluri had many stellar accomplishments in […]

Structures in Turbulence: An interview with Garry Brown

Garry Brown is professor emeritus at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. He is a distinguished fluid dynamicist, well-known for his work with Anatol Roshko where they found unexpected order within turbulent flow. He was at IISc in late 2017, teaching a course on shear turbulence with his friend Roddam Narasimha. Excerpts […]

How IISc Launched Aerospace Research in India

And how its alumni shaped it in the years that followed IISc set up its Department of Aeronautical Engineering in 1942 – bang in the middle of World War II. It was the year that the Nazis were to begin acting on their horrific plan for a “Final Solution”, that the Japanese military strengthened its […]

Hans Liepmann with his wife Dietlind (Photo courtesy: Roddam Narasimha)

Hans Liepmann: The Teacher Who Had a Lasting Influence on Satish Dhawan and Roddam Narasimha

In 1964, Hans Liepmann from Caltech arrived at IISc for a term. SM Deshpande, then doing his ME in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, remembers the “glorious combination” that resulted. “Liepmann taught our batch,” says Deshpande, now at the Engineering Mechanics Unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. “We were very lucky. […]

Goutam Chattopadhyay Talks about Space Exploration and Terahertz Technology

Goutam Chattopadhyay is a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and also a visiting Professor at the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy at Caltech. After his undergraduate studies from the University of Calcutta (Bengal Engineering College), he worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) […]