- Prof. Shankar Narasimhan Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras
Prof. Shankar Narasimhan is currently the M.S. Ananth Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Madras. Earlier he was an Associate Professor in the Chemical Engineering department at IIT Kanpur. His major research interests are in the areas of Data Mining, Process Design and Optimization, Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) and Fault Tolerant Control. Prof. Shankar Narasimhan is well known for his work in the area of Data Reconciliation in which he has co-authored several important papers and a book which has received critical appreciation in India and abroad.
Along with Engineers India Ltd. Gurgaon, he has developed a software package for applying data reconciliation and gross error detection technique to process industries. For this work, he received the Engineers India Research Award instituted at IIT Kanpur in 1994-1995. In collaboration with a colleague from Civil Engineering, he has also developed a software package for leak detection in gas pipeline networks, which has been field tested on a pipeline owned and operated by GAIL. In the area of process design, he has made important and seminal contributions towards design of sensor networks, heat exchanger networks, and water distribution networks.
He has been a visiting professor at the Centre for Automatic Control in Nancy, France, Purdue University, Clarkson University and Texas Tech University in USA and the University of Alberta in Canada. He has also spent summer internships at Engineers India Ltd., R&D Centre in Gurgaon, Honeywell Technology Solutions Ltd., R&D Centre at Bangalore, and ABB Global Services Ltd., Bangalore as part of high-level industry-academia interactions. Along with Prof. Raghunathan Rengaswamy of IIT Madras, he co-founded Gyan Data Pvt. Ltd. in 2011, which specializes in providing services and products in data analytics, process modeling and optimization. Prof. Shankar Narasimhan was elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2012.
