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Suvranu De to Lead Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Computational mechanics expert Suvranu De has been named the
new head of the Department of Mechanical,
Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering (MANE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. The appointment is effective June 1, 2012.
“Dr. De is a gifted scholar and outstanding educator. His
vision for MANE is compelling and forward looking, and will
help position the department to have an even greater impact in
the years ahead,” said
David Rosowsky, dean of the School of Engineering at
Rensselaer. “Suvranu’s enthusiastic and ambitious
leadership will help to propel this department upward, forward,
and outward. He shares my deep commitment to providing a
world-class engineering education to our students and to
creating an environment conducive to learning and discovery
throughout the School of Engineering.”
De joined the Rensselaer School of Engineering and MANE as
an assistant professor in 2002, became an associate professor
in 2007, and a full professor in 2011. He has joint
appointments in the Rensselaer Department of Biomedical
Engineering and Department of Information
Technology and Web Science. In 2010 he was named director
of the newly formed Rensselaer Center for Modeling,
Simulation and Imaging in Medicine.
“With exponential growth in research, overwhelming student
interest and unprecedented recognition of its faculty and
students in the national and international arena, this is
indeed the most exciting time in the history of MANE, and I am
both honored and deeply humbled to have the opportunity to
serve as its department head,” De said. “Home to three
top-ranked engineering programs in the country, MANE is an
unparalleled intellectual powerhouse that is uniquely
positioned to solve some of the most challenging problems of
our times and lead the nation and world in groundbreaking
research, innovative education, and service of the highest
quality to all its stakeholders.”
MANE is the largest department at Rensselaer, with more than
1,100 undergraduate students, 150 graduate students, and 36
tenured or tenure-track faculty. MANE ranks in the top 20
departments of its kind nationwide.
A prolific researcher, De is known internationally for his
work on computational mechanics and multiscale modeling. A
major aspect of his research program is developing new
touch-sensitive virtual reality tools for training surgeons and
simulating experimental surgical techniques. Along with
creating accurate computer models of human internal organs, De
develops realistic hardware interfaces with real surgical tools
that can interact with the computer models in real time. He
pursues this research with more than $10 million in funding
from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of
Naval Research, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Army Research
Office, and other agencies.
De is the recipient of a 2005 Office of Naval Research Young
Investigator Award, the Rensselaer School of Engineering
Excellence Award in 2008, the inaugural James M. Tien ’66 Early
Career Award for Faculty in 2009, and the Rensselaer School of
Engineering Outstanding Team Award in 2012. He is a senior
member of IEEE, and serves as chair of the Computational
Bioengineering committee of the U.S. Association for
Computational Mechanics and vice chair of the IEEE Technical
Committee on Haptics. De has published a book and more than 200
book chapters and papers in journals and conferences. He also
serves on editorial boards of national and international
conferences and journals and on several peer review panels of
federal funding organizations.
De received his bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University
in Calcutta, India, his master’s degree from the Indian
Institute of Science, Bangalore, and his doctoral degree from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in mechanical
engineering.
For more information on De and MANE at Rensselaer,
visit:
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Published
May 11,
2012 |
Contact: Michael Mullaney
Phone: (518) 276-6161
E-mail: mullam@rpi.edu |
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