Subra Suresh is an Indian-American biological engineer, materials scientist, and academic administrator. On 1 January 2018, he was inaugurated as the fourth President of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, where he is also the inaugural Distinguished University Professor.
Subra Suresh was Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT from 2007 to 2010 was appointed as Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) by Barack Obama, where he served from 2010 to 2013. He was the president of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) from 2013 to 2017.
He is one of a very small number of Americans to be elected to three branches of the U.S. National Academies, and the only current university president to hold this distinction.
Suresh was born in Mumbai, India, and graduated from high school in Tamil Nadu at the age of 15. In May 1977, he received his BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai. .Suresh received a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University in 1979, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, specializing in materials science. After postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,he joined as assistant professor of engineering at Brown University in December 1983. He has received host of awards for his research and its publications. In 1991, His book Fatigue of Materials was published by Cambridge University Press.[9] According to Google Scholar it has been cited more than 5,300 times in scholarly publications, and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese and adopted as both a textbook and a reference work.
Suresh moved to MIT in 1993 as Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and led MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering ,then as Dean of Engineering from 2007 to 2010 and held MIT faculty appointments in Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering, and Health Sciences and Technology.
In his leadership roles at MIT, he helped create new state-of-the-art laboratories, a new undergraduate curriculum in materials science and engineering, the MIT Transportation Initiative, and the Center for Computational Engineering; led MIT’s efforts in establishing the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Center; and oversaw the recruitment of a record number of women faculty in engineering. As Dean of Engineering, he launched or oversaw a number of MIT’s major international programs in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. In June 2010,
Suresh was appointed by the U.S. President Barack Obama as the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) with an annual (US)$7-billion budget. Its initiatives keep the United States at the forefront of science and engineering, empower future generations of scientists and engineers, and foster economic growth and innovation. NSF funds discovery, learning, innovation, and research infrastructure to boost U.S. leadership in all aspects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics research and education. In Fiscal Year 2012, NSF supported more than 300,000 individuals in 1,895 institutions in every state in the United States”.
Suresh was appointed as the 9th president of Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and served as president until 2017. Suresh also negotiated several major donations from philanthropists and corporations,”Diversity in the broadest sense — intellectual, cultural, ethnic, racial or national origin — intrinsically enhances artistic and technical innovation”.