Sridhar Iyengar

Fifteen young innovators and entrepreneurs of Indian origin were given the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) ‘Global Indus Technovators Awards 2004’ at the Wong Auditorium in MIT, Cambridge, MA, on Nov. 17.

More than 150 nominations were received for the award from around 15 countries in the four categories, a press release issued by the MIT said.

Sanjay Sarma

The awards are instituted to honor contributions by young innovators working at the cutting-edge of technology with far-reaching applications. The awardees in various categories are:

n Materials and devices: Sridhar G. Iyengar of AgaMatrix; Sanjay Sarma of Massachusetts Institute of Technology/OatSystems, Akhil Madhani of Walt Disney Imagineering, research and Development and Kailas Narendran of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Akhil Madhani

n Biotechnology, medicine and health care: Ganesh Venkataraman of Momenta Pharmaceuticals; Sangeeta Bhatia of University of California, San Diego; Vamsi Mootha of Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Ravi Kamath, Harvard Medical School student/MGH resident; and Vijay Pande of Stanford University.

n Information technology: Kumar Sivarajan of Tejas Networks India Ltd.; Venu Govindaraju of University at Buffalo/CEDAR; Anand Chandrasekaran of Aeroprise Inc.; and Vijay Manwani of Blade Logic.

Kailas Narendran

n Grassroots Development/Energy: Sonal Shah of Center for American Progress/Indicorps and Sandeep Pandey of Asha for Education.

Combining his background in electrical engineering and biological sciences, Iyengar, founder of AgaMatrix –– a biosensor-based medical diagnostics company –– conceived of and pioneered the concept of using an advanced DSP approach to enhance biosensor performance.

G. Venkataraman

Sarma of MIT is credited with defining and developing many of the standards and technologies that form the foundation of the commercial Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) industry.

Winner of $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in 1998 for his clever developments in robotics, Madhani has flourished on the frontier of Artificial Intelligence.

Sangeeta Bhatia

In addition to his work on the Active Joint Brace, an electromechanical device that increases a person’s functional independence by working in tandem with existing muscles, Narendran’s research focuses on developing this technology.

Dr. Venkataraman is one of the scientific founders of Momenta Pharmaceuticals –– a company striving to apply the understanding of complex sugars to drug discovery and development. Dr. Bhatia’s lab focuses on the integration of micro- and nanotechnology tools with live cells and biomolecules for diverse applications, including biosensing, stem cell biology and tumor targeting, the release added.

Vamsi Mootha

Dr. Mootha hopes to discover the genes that underlie human metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity and eventually develop new therapies.

Born in the U.S., Kamath has been instrumental in developing new methods for high-throughput functional genomics in C. elegans that have dramatically accelerated the pace at which the functions of genes can be identified.

Ravi Kamath

Prof. Pande’s team has broadened its view to investigating RNA folding, protein-protein interactions, the interactions of lipid membranes, and a number of other problems.

Dr. Sivarajan is considered as one of the early pioneers in the field of optical networking. A winner of numerous prestigious awards for his research and academic work, he has also authored ‘Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective,’ a widely used textbook in the field.

Vijay Pande

Govindaraju led the research group at the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) that developed Handwritten Address Interpretation (HWAI) technology which has saved the United States Postal Service a few hundred million dollars a year.

Chandrasekaran designed the Mobile Workflow Management system and co-founded Aeroprise. He now has clients like Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and IBM, among others. Manwani, co-founder of BladeLogic, has held technology positions at Unisys, TCI and Cambridge Technology Partners.

Kumar Sivarajan

Shah is the co-founder and the U.S. director of Indicorps –– a nonprofit organization that helps young Indian-Americans reconnect with their heritage by providing them with the opportunity of one-year fellowships to spend time in India doing community work at grassroots level.

Pandey formed Asha (Hope) –– a nonprofit organization to support education for poor children in India. He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay award in 2002.

(Compiled from a press release by Nishant Arora)