Alumni
Prof Satish Dhawan
Research Award
Swapnesh Banerjee • CSA, ECE, EE, ESE, CDS, RBCCPS, and CENSE • Ongoing
About
Prof Satish Dhawan Research Award was instituted by alumnus Swapnesh Banerjee (M.E. Electrical Engineering, 1998) to promote impactful research in advanced computer and communication systems, with a particular focus on benefiting developing countries.
Eligibility
- The award is open to all researchers working on hardware and/or software/algorithms in areas including, but not limited to, improved connectivity and efficient digital delivery of services, IoT networks and devices, and signal/image processing. Students and researchers from the CSA, ECE, EE, ESE, CDS, RBCCPS, and CENSE departments are eligible.
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Awarded to the most impactful research carried out in the area of advanced computer and communication systems with a focus on developing countries.
Entitlements
This annual award consists of a cash prize of Rs 100,000/- and citation to the awardee.
Winners
2024 Rishubh Parihar
Significant contributions to the mechanisms for controlling generative models
for images thus enabling many applications in image processing.
2023 Siddharth Asokan
Siddharth Asokan has been awarded the Prof Satish Dhawan Research Award 2023 for his significant contributions relating generative adversarial networks and diffusion models to high-dimension interpolation, Fourier approximations, and partial differential equations in very large dimensional space.
2022 Nithin Abraham
Nithin Abraham, PhD student in the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, has been recommended for the award for his work on ‘Demonstration of the first 2D-material based single photon detector at 1550nm operating at room temperature and a true random number generator with record-high min-entropy’.
Prof Satish Dhawan
Prof. Satish Dhawan was a pioneering aerospace engineer and a key figure in Indian space research. He is best known for his work at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), where he served as the Chairman. His contributions to experimental fluid dynamics, particularly in boundary layer theory, were groundbreaking, and he played a pivotal role in advancing India’s space program by spearheading projects like the SLV-3 and ASLV.
At IISc, Dhawan made significant strides in aerodynamics research, helping develop India’s first supersonic wind tunnels and mentoring a generation of scientists. His leadership emphasized both scientific rigor and practical engineering applications, which has left a lasting legacy in the field of aerospace engineering and space research.
Swapnesh Banerjee
Swapnesh Banerjee graduated with a degree in Physics from Jadavpur University and then a Master’s (Integrated) in Electrical Engineering from IISc in 1998. He then went on to spend more than two decades as an engineer and architect in the software industry, primarily in Hewlett Packard Bangalore after a brief stint in Lucent and Lockheed Martin in the USA. His primary expertise and interests were in the areas of scalable infrastructure operations and management software, specifically in networking as well as storage technologies. After spending 24 years in various technical roles in the industry, he has now moved into the NGO sector, volunteering time and effort to help underprivileged children.