It was in 1946 that Dhawan arrived at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT, now Graduate Aerospace Laboratories), wanting to work with Hans Liepmann. But the Indian students Liepmann had worked with until then had given him the impression that “perhaps the select group that came to Caltech from India […]
Author: Nithyanand Rao
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 […]
Learning for All
The Centre for Continuing Education has something for everyone The Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) grew out of an awareness that, for institutions like IISc, imparting knowledge to people beyond their boundaries is an important part of their service to the community. Continuing education, as a brochure from CCE’s early years states, is […]
Nanotechnology for the Nation
The Indian Nanoelectronics Users’ Program (INUP), at IISc and IIT Bombay, is training researchers across the country to build national capability in nanoelectronics Since it began in 2008, the Indian Nanoelectronics Users’ Program (INUP) has received exceptional positive feedback from its participants. Among them are college teachers who say that their participation in the training […]
‘Dhawan introduced a new personality to IISc’: Roddam Narasimha
Roddam Narasimha is the DST Year-of-Science Professor at the Engineering Mechanics Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. Narasimha, a former professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IISc, was one of Satish Dhawan’s earliest students. In this excerpt from a wide-ranging interview, he shares his memories of Dhawan. What was […]
Outsmarting the Hepatitis C Virus
How researchers at IISc are working on turning research on translation to translational research When Saumitra Das was a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles, he discovered how to inhibit polio virus translation. That is, how to stop the virus from hijacking its host cell’s machinery to manufacture its own proteins. Das had […]
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. […]
Kanishka Crash, 1985: How Metallurgy Helped Expose a Terrorist Attack
Former IISc metallurgist V Ramachandran helped establish that a mid-air explosion brought down the plane V Ramachandran recognised the fragment from a stantion, one of the structural elements used to support the fuselage of the aeroplane. But it didn’t look normal: the aluminium tube had fractured and curled inwards by almost a full circle. […]
Subbiah Arunachalam, “Mr Open Access”, Tells us Why Policy Research is Important
Subbiah Arunachalam is a visiting scientist at the DST Centre for Policy Research, IISc. Arunachalam started out as a researcher in chemistry, then became an editor of scientific journals, but eventually turned to his interest in information science. He is known for his work in scientometrics and in the past two decades for his advocacy […]