Alumnus and eminent academician Prof. Tapan Bagchi (DSc/2012), is setting up a Chair Professorship in the memory of illustrious alumnus Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya who recently passed away. An MoU to this effect was signed last week with Prof. Bagchi to this effect.
The objective of the ‘Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya Chair Professorship Award’ will be to carry out state-of-the-art teaching, research development and industrial collaboration at the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Lord Bhattacharyya was a renowned academic, manufacturing expert and leading consultant for industry and governments. He served as a Professor at the University of Warwick. The entrepreneur in him led him to found the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), UK’s leading research and innovation centre. He did his BTech in 1960 in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. He has contributed immensely to his alma mater through spearheading various collaborations between the Institute and WMG in areas encompassing design and manufacturing, composites and sustainable materials, sound quality engineering, medical technology and healthcare, hybrid vehicles and steel technology. WMG also became the international partner of IIT Kharagpur’s Centre of Excellence in Advanced Manufacturing Technology in 2015. Lord Bhattacharyya passed away in February 2019. (Click here to read more on Lord Bhattacharyya)
To honour the contributions of Lord Bhattacharyya, Prof. Tapan Bagchi, who himself is a stalwart and academic expert in multifarious domains and has been associated with IIT Kharagpur and various other academic institutions as faculty and as Director, is setting up an endowment for an amount ₹75, 00,000/- to cover the Chair Award expenses for perpetuity.
WMG set up by Late Prof Lord Bhattacharyya and the Warwick University too, have agreed to support this initiative.
Prof. Bagchi is currently serving as Adjunct Professor at IIT Kharagpur. The students and researchers have been benefitted with his dynamic expertise in areas including Specialty Chemicals Manufacturing, Production Planning, Supply Chain Management, TQM, Product Engineering, Process Engineering, Technology Transfer, Petrochemicals R&D, Facilities Planning, Economic and Cost Analysis and Corporate Planning. He was previously faculty at the Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Vinod Gupta School of Management before joining Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (Shirpur) and KiiT University (Bhubaneswar) as Director. He has also served as faculty at IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay and has an academic association at present with IIM Lucknow. IIT Kharagpur awarded him D.Sc. in 2012.
Prof. Bagchi has also set up a modern Reading Room cum Lounge in the Institute’s Central Library.