IIT Bombay director Ashok Misra resigns to join Intellectual Ventures
21 Jul 2008
Ashok Misra, director of Indian Institute Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) since 2000, has resigned to join Washington-based Intellectual Ventures that invests in inventions and aims to develop a patents portfolio.
He announced the acceptance of his resignation at the culmination of the IIT-Bangalore's Golden Jubilee Conference in New York on Sunday, which was attended by a large number of people and addressed by Indian Ambassador to US Ronen Sen and eminent personalities from the field of technology and business.
A distinguished engineer and scientist, Misra has for more than three decades served in the field of education as a teacher and a researcher. Prof. Misra obtained his B.Tech. degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1968, M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tufts University in 1969 and Ph.D. in Polymer Science & Engineering from University of Massachusetts in 1974.
He also completed the Executive Development Program in 1999 at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, Illinois.
During his tenure as director, IIT-B was made into a leading R&D institute while maintaining its leadership in quality engineering education in India.
He won the Prof. M. Santappa Silver Jubilee Award given by The Society for Polymer Science, India, in recognition of "Outstanding Research and Leadership in Polymer Science", 1991. His research interests include engineering polymers, polymer blends/alloys, fibre reinforced thermoplastic composites, liquid crystal polymers & their blends, structure-property correlations, polymer rheology & processing and incremental drawing of synthetic fibres and polymer product design.
Besides having been published 70 times in international journals and having been awarded 6 patents, Prof. Misra has written two books. He wrote "Relationship of Material Properties to Structure and Estimation of Polymer Properties" jointly with Don J. David in 1999, and a second book titled "Polymer Processing Analysis".
