Satish Udpa, Jayadeva Acharya & Rohini Pande win academic recognition in America

January 2019: Indian achievers in America

Satish Udpa interim president Michigan State University

Michigan State University appointed Satish Udpa as acting president. This was after John Engler resigned the post. The university is dealing with allegations of sexual abuse of athletes by Larry Nassar, a physician.

Udpa will serve until a permanent president is selected. He is currently executive vice president for administrative services at the university.

Before becoming an executive vice president, Udpa served as dean of the College of Engineering and chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Prior to joining MSU in 2001, he was the Whitney Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. He also served as the permanent secretary of the World Federation of NDE Centers from 1998 to 2003. Udpa received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Colorado State University.

Jayadev Acharya, Cornell University, wins National Science Award

Jayadev Acharya, Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, received a U.S. National Science Foundation Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award from the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). The award supports his research proposal on “Statistical Inference Under Information Constraints: Efficient Algorithms and Fundamental Limits” for a five-year period from 2019 through 2024 with a total amount of $552,654.

Acharya is an assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a graduate field member in Computer Science, and Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Theory of Computation Group at MIT, hosted by Piotr Indyk. He got his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC San Diego, where he was advised by Alon Orlitsky. He has a degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.

Rohini Pande awarded American Economic Association prize

Rohini Pande, Rafik Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the recipient of the 2018 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. The American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession has given out the award every year since 1998 to honor an "individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession or mentoring others."

Pande’s work examines how institutions can be designed to empower historically disadvantaged groups. In particular, she is best known for work on gender and economic development, conducting ground-breaking work on changing institutions to give women control over their own social and economic lives.

Professor Pande earned her doctorate in economics from the London School of Economics in 1999. Earlier in her career, she served as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Columbia University and as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. She has also held visiting professor positions at Stanford, Pompeu Fabra, Berkeley, and MIT.

Her photo is from her website.