Mangalore Anantha Pai is an Indian electrical engineer, academic and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. A former professor of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, he is known for his contributions in the fields of power stability, power grids, large scale power system analysis, system security and optimal control of nuclear reactors and he has published 8 books and several articles. Pai is the first India born scientist to be awarded a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
Pai is an IEEE Life Fellow and is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, and Indian National Academy of Engineers and an elected and life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1974.
M. A. Pai. born on 5 October 1931 in the south Indian state of Karnataka, did his graduate studies in electrical engineering at the University of Madras and after completing the course in 1953, started his career as an electrical engineer at the Electric Supply Department of Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport, then known as Bombay Electric Supply and Transport BEST Undertaking. After a service of 4 years, he moved to the US in 1957 where he completed his masters degree in electrical engineering MS at University of California, Berkeley in 1958 and continued at the institution to secure a PhD in 1961. Subsequently, he joined the university as an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley 1961–62 before taking up Professorship at University of California, Los Angeles UCLA in 1962. At UCLA, he had the opportunity to work with Eliahu I. Jury, a Rufus Oldenburger laureate on discrete time systems, and in 1963 he returned to India to join the Electrical Engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur as an assistant professor. He served the institute till 1981 during which period he held the positions of an associate professor from 1966 to 1969 and a professor thereafter till he went back to the US as a visiting professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1981. He also had a stint as a consultant to the Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited from 1971 to 1979. After two years of service as a visiting faculty at Illinois, he became a regular professor in 1983 and served out his academic career to superannuate in 2003. In between, he also served as a visiting professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Iowa State University and visited India on a CSIR-UNDP program at Central Power Research Institute. Post-retirement, Illinois University made him an emeritus professor. He also serves as a consultant to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, advising them on Model Reduction and Dynamic Security of Power System.