Two engineering faculty members - Suresh Sitaraman and Madhavan Swaminathan - received Distinguished Alumni Awards from the National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, India. The Honorable Pranab Mukherjee, president of India, presented Sitaraman and Swaminathan along with 30 additional distinguished recipients with this honor in July  at the NITT campus, which is currently celebrating its 50-Year Golden Jubilee.

At Georgia Tech, Sitaraman’s research focuses on the design, fabrication, characterization, modeling and reliability of micro-scale and nano-scale structures intended for microsystems that are used in aerospace, automotive, computing, telecommunicating and medical applications.  He has obtained multi-million dollar funding from several U.S. federal agencies and companies to carry out his research.  He has authored more than 240 research papers in highly-respected journals and conferences, and he has guided several post-doctoral fellows and visiting scholars, more than 45 PhD and MSME students, and a significant number of undergraduate and high-school students.  Also, he has made numerous presentations, including keynote and invited, in conferences, workshops, academia, industry, and research consortia.

Swaminathan received his bachelor of engineering degree in electronics and communications from NITT in 1985 and went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees from Syracuse University in 1989 and 1991, respectively. In addition to his accomplishments at Georgia Tech and IBM, Swaminathan was recognized for helping to shape the design aspects of packaging that have led to the development of system on package technologies around the world, including the creation of an electronic packaging program at NITT and the education of engineers and scientists in India from both the private and public sectors.

Swaminathan was recognized for his pioneering work and leadership in electronic packaging at Georgia Tech and IBM over the last 25 years. He is a faculty member at Georgia Tech, where he currently holds the John Pippin Chair in Electromagnetics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is the director of the Interconnect and Packaging Center. He also served as the deputy director of the Microsystems Packaging Research Center, a National Science Foundation-sponsored Engineering Research Center. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked for IBM on the packaging for supercomputers. As the leader of the Mixed-Signal Design Research Group in ECE, Swaminathan has graduated 35 Ph.D. and 17 M.S. students. He has published more than 400 technical articles, holds 27 patents, and has authored three books, all related to electronic packaging. He also co-founded and founded two spin-off companies, Jacket Micro Devices (JMD), which focused on integrated RF modules and substrates for wireless applications, and E-System Design, which focuses on the development of CAD tools for integrated 3D microsystems.