Subra Suresh

Subra Suresh (born May 30, 1956) is the ninth and cur-rent president of Carnegie Mellon University.A distinguished engineer and scientist, Suresh served asDirector of the National Science Foundation from 2010to 2013. Before his appointment to NSF, he was theVannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he wasthe Dean of the School of Engineering (2007-2010).In October 2013, Suresh was elected to the Institute ofMedicine, the branch of the U.S. National Academiesthat honors researchers in medicine and health care. Healready had been elected to the National Academy of Sci-ences (2012) and the National Academy of Engineering(2002). Suresh is one of only 16 American scientists tobe elected to all three branches, and the only current uni-versity president to hold this distinction. He is the firstAsian-born professor to lead any of the five schools atMIT and the first Asian-born scientist to lead NSF.[1]

His appointment as president of Carnegie Mellon Univer-sity was announced on February 5, 2013.[2] Comment-ing on Suresh’s tenure at NSF, President Obama stated,“We have been very fortunate to have Subra Suresh guid-ing the National Science Foundation . . . . [He] hasshown himself to be a consummate scientist and engi-neer -- beholden to evidence and committed to uphold-ing the highest scientific standards. He has also donehis part to make sure the American people benefit fromadvances in technology, and opened up more opportuni-ties for women, minorities, and other underrepresentedgroups. I am grateful for his service.”[3]

1 Background and Education

Suresh graduated from 10th grade in Tamil Nadu, India,at the age of 15. He received his BTech from the IndianInstitute of Technology Madras in Chennai in May 1977and his MS from Iowa State University in May 1979. Hecompleted his doctoral thesis two years later, in August1981, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, re-ceiving a ScD.

2 Leadership Roles

2.1 Brown University

Suresh joined Brown University in December 1983 asAssistant Professor of Engineering and was promoted toAssociate Professor with tenure in July 1986 and to Pro-fessor in July 1989. In 1985, he was selected by theWhiteHouse to receive the NSF Presidential Young Investiga-tor Award. Prior to and during his tenure at Brown Uni-versity, he received many other honors including: TheHardy Gold Medal “for exceptional promise of a suc-cessful career in the broad field of metallurgy by a met-allurgist under the age of 30,” and the 1985 MatthewsonGold Medal from The Minerals, Metals & Materials So-ciety for the best paper published inMetallurgical Trans-actions, and the 1992 Ross Coffin Purdy Award from theAmerican Ceramic Society for the best paper publishedin the Journal of the American Ceramic Society during1990. In 1991, he authored Fatigue of Materials, a bookpublished by Cambridge University Press and that has re-mained a classic in the field for two decades. It has beencited more than 2,500 times by scientists and engineers inscholarly publications, adopted as both a textbook and areference work, and translated into Chinese and Japanese.

2.2 MIT

Prior to assuming his position as director of NSF,Suresh served as MIT’s Dean of Engineering fromJuly 2007[4] and had held MIT faculty appointments inMaterials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engi-neering, Biological Engineering, and Health Sciences andTechnology. He headed MIT’s Department of MaterialsScience and Engineering from 2000-2006.In his leadership roles at MIT, he helped create newstate-of-the-art laboratories, a new undergraduate cur-riculum in materials science and engineering, the MITTransportation Initiative, and the Center for Compu-tational Engineering; led MIT’s efforts in establishingthe Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technol-ogy (SMART) Center; and oversaw the recruitment ofa record number of women faculty in engineering.[5] AsDean of Engineering, he launched and/or oversaw thegrowth of a number of MIT’s major international pro-grams in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Ameri-cas.

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2 3 RESEARCH

2.3 NSF

In June 2010, Suresh was nominated by US PresidentBarack Obama[6] to be the Director of the National Sci-ence Foundation and was unanimously confirmed by theUS Senate in September 2010.[7] From 2010-2013, heled[8] this independent federal agency with an annual(US)$7-billion budget; according to its 2013 Fact Sheet,“its programs and initiatives keep the United States atthe forefront of science and engineering, empower fu-ture generations of scientists and engineers, and fostereconomic growth and innovation. NSF funds discovery,learning, innovation, and research infrastructure to boostUS leadership in all aspects of science, technology, en-gineering, and mathematics research and education. InFiscal Year 2012, NSF supported more than 300,000 in-dividuals in 1,895 institutions in every state in the UnitedStates.”[9]

As Director of NSF, Suresh established a number ofnew initiatives including INSPIRE (Integrated NSF Sup-port Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Educa-tion); PEER (Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement inResearch, in collaboration with the United States Agencyfor International Development [USAID]); SAVI (Sci-ence Across Virtual Institutes); the NSF Career-Life Bal-ance Initiative; GROW (Graduate Research Opportu-nities Worldwide); and the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps).[10]

Suresh served as a member of the National Scienceand Technology Council (NSTC), a cabinet-level councilcomprising federal agency heads and cabinet secretaries.He also co-chaired the NSTC Committee on Science andthe Committee on STEM (Science, Technology, Engi-neering andMathematics) Education, and he is a memberof the cabinet-level National Ocean Council. Suresh alsochaired the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Commit-tee (IARPC), which helped set priorities for coordinatingfuture arctic research across the federal government. Un-der Suresh’s leadership, IARPC released a multiagencyfive-year strategic plan.[11]

In response to an invitation from the White House Of-fice of Science and Technology Policy, Suresh chaired aGlobal Summit on ScientificMerit Review at NSF inMay2012. This Summit included the participation, for thefirst time, of the heads of leading science funding agen-cies from nearly 50 countries.[12] Summit participants en-dorsed a Statement of Principles of Scientific Merit Re-view to serve as a basis of potential multilateral collabo-rations in the future.[13] The participants also collectivelylaunched a virtual entity, the Global Research Council(GRC), in an attempt to coordinate practices so as to en-hance international collaboration in Science among de-veloped and developing countries.[14][15]

2.4 Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Suresh is the 9th president of Carnegie Mel-lon University, assuming office on July 1, 2013.[2]Suresh maintains faculty appointments in Carnegie Mel-lon’s Departments of Materials Science and Engineering,Biomedical Engineering, Engineering and Public Pol-icy, Computational Biology Department and in the HeinzCollege.

3 Research

His experimental research focuses on modeling the me-chanical properties of structural and functional materi-als, innovations in materials design and characterization,and discoveries of possible connections between cellu-lar nanomechanical processes and human disease states.Some of this work has spawned new fields in the fer-tile interdisciplinary intersections of traditional disci-plines in engineering, physical sciences, life sciences, andmedicine. More than 100 students, postdoctoral fellows,and visiting scholars have been members of his researchgroup, and many of them now occupy prominent posi-tions in academia, industry, and government worldwide.

3.1 Publications, Patents

Suresh is the author or co-author of more than 240research articles in international journals, co-editor offive books, and co-inventor on 22 US and internationalpatent applications. He has authored or co-authored threewidely used material science books: Fatigue of Materi-als, Fundamentals of Functionally Graded Materials, andThin Film Materials. He is one of the most-cited scien-tists in materials science, according to Thomson ReutersInstitute for Scientific Information. In 2011, ScienceWatch/Thomson Reuters selected Suresh as one of thetop-100 scientists for the decade 2000-2010 in its world-wide ranking of the field of Materials Science.[16]

Suresh’s research contributions at the intersections of en-gineering, physical sciences, life sciences, and medicineinclude:

• Identification of key mechanisms that influence thegrowth of fatigue cracks in a wide variety of brittleand ductile materials;

• Development of experimental and computationalmethods for optimizing the mechanical perfor-mance of composites and compositionally gradedmaterials;

• Formulation of new experimental methods and al-gorithms for linking the mechanical characteristicsof thin films, coatings, and multi-layered materialswith performance;

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• Discovery of nanocrystallization during room-temperature mechanical contact in metallic glasses;

• Development of strategies to optimize strength, duc-tility, and damage tolerance of materials through thecontrolled introduction of nano-scale internal inter-faces;

• Delineation of important links between the mechan-ics of individual blood cells and human diseasestates, through experiments and computation;

• Discovery of the role of RESA [ring-infected ery-throcyte surface antigen] protein in modulating themechanical properties and rheological response ofhuman blood cells invaded by malaria parasites; and

• Development of new microfluidic platforms for hu-man disease diagnostics, therapeutics and drug effi-cacy assays.

4 Honors

In 2013, Suresh was elected to the Institute of Medicine,making him one of only 16 Americans who are membersof all three branches of the U.S. National Academies.He had been elected to the National Academy of Sciencein 2012 and to the National Academy of Engineering in2002.In 2011, Suresh received the Padma Shri award, India’sfourth highest civilian honor, bestowed by the Presidentof India.[17] Other honors include the 2006 Acta Materi-alia Gold Medal; the 2007 European Materials Medal,the highest honor conferred by the Federation of Eu-ropean Materials Societies comprising 27 countries (hewas the first scientist based outside Europe to receivethis medal); the 2008 Eringen Medal of the Society ofEngineering Science; the 2011 General President’s GoldMedal from the Indian National Science Congress; the2012R.F.Mehl Award fromTheMinerals, Metals&Ma-terials Society; the 2011 NadaiMedal from the AmericanSociety of Mechanical Engineers (ASME); and the 2011National Materials Advancement Award from the Feder-ation of Materials Societies. He also received ASME’s2012 Timoshenko Medal, the highest global recognitionin the field of theoretical and applied mechanics.In 2006, Technology Review magazine selected his workon nanobiomechanics as one of the top-10 emerging tech-nologies that “will have a significant impact on business,medicine or culture.” Suresh received the Franklin Insti-tute's 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical En-gineering and Materials Science for “outstanding contri-butions to our understanding of the mechanical behaviorof materials in applications ranging from large structuresdown to the atomic level. This research also showed howdeformation of biological cells can be linked to humandisease.”[18][19]

Suresh also received the Alan Cottrell Gold Medal for hispioneering work on fracture and fatigue ofmaterials at the2013 International Conference on Fracture.Suresh also a member of the Spanish Royal Academyof Engineering; Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences;German National Academy of Sciences; Royal SwedishAcademy of Engineering Sciences; Academy of Sciencesfor the Developing World (TWAS) in Trieste, Italy; In-dian National Academy of Engineering; Indian Academyof Sciences (Bangalore), and, most recently in 2014,the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a recipientof eleven honorary doctorate degrees from universitiesin the United States, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, India,China, and the United Kingdom.Suresh has been elected a fellow or honorary fellow by allmajor materials societies in the United States and India,including the Materials Research Society, the AmericanSociety for Materials International; The Minerals, Metals& Materials Society; the American Society of Mechani-cal Engineers; the American Ceramic Society; the IndianInstitute of Metals; and the Materials Research Societyof India.He became a member of the board of directors of Bat-telle in August 2014. He is a director of the AlleghenyConference on Community Development and a memberof the board of directors of the Pittsburgh Symphony Or-chestra.

5 References[1] “Carnegie Mellon University.”. www.cmu.edu.

[2] “Carnegie Mellon Selects Ninth President” (Press re-lease). Carnegie Mellon University. February 5, 2013.Retrieved February 5, 2013.

[3] White House, Press Secretary (02/06/2013). “Statementfrom the President on the Departure of Subra Suresh”.Retrieved 12 February 2013. Check date values in: |date=(help)

[4] “Suresh Is New Dean of Engineering”. MIT News. June14, 2007.

[5] MIT. “Subra Suresh to head National Science Founda-tion”. MIT. Retrieved April 9, 2012.

[6] Mervis, Jeffrey (June 11, 2010). “Obama’s Nom-inee to Lead NSF Lauded for Science and Man-agement Skills”. Science 328 (5984): 1340–1341.doi:10.1126/science.328.5984.1340-a. Retrieved April9, 2012.

[7] Jones, R.M. (2010). “Senate Confirms Subra Suresh asNational Science Foundation Director”. FYI: The AIPBulletin of Science Policy News (103). Retrieved March23, 2012.

[8] Hand, E. (2011). “Merit comes first: National ScienceFoundation director Subra Suresh reveals how his agency

4 6 EXTERNAL LINKS

is coping with a grim fiscal outlook”. Nature 477 (7364):263. doi:10.1038/477263a. PMID 21921894.

[9] National Science Foundation. “NSF Fact Sheet” (PDF).

[10] Morrissey, Susan (January 23, 2012). “Subra Suresh”.Chemical & Engineering News 90 (4): 9–12. RetrievedApril 2, 2012.

[11] “Arctic Research Plan 2013-2017” (PDF). Retrieved 22March 2013.

[12] Suresh, Subra (August 12, 2011). “Moving To-ward Global Science”. Science 333 (6044): 802.doi:10.1126/science.1210025. Retrieved April 2, 2012.

[13] “Statement of Principles for Scientific Merit Review*"(PDF). Retrieved 7 June 2012.

[14] “Global Summit on Merit Review”. Retrieved 7 June2012.

[15] Suresh, S. (May 25, 2012). “Cultivating Global Science”.Science 336 (6084): 959. doi:10.1126/science.1224580.Retrieved 7 June 2012.

[16] Thomson Reuters. “Top 100 Materials Scientists”. Sci-ence Watch. Thomson Reuters. Retrieved April 12, 2012.

[17] “P Rama Rao Gets Padma Vibhushan; Padma Shri forSubra Suresh”. The Times of India - Times Now. January25, 2011. Retrieved March 23, 2012.

[18] Franklin Institute. “Press Release”. Franklin Institute.Retrieved 22 October 2012.

[19] “Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering”.Franklin Institute. 2013. Retrieved April 29, 2013.

6 External links• Biography at Carnegie Mellon University

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