V Ramgopal Rao

Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay.

Synopsis

In this talk we will understand the current status of the Nanotechnology research in India & abroad and see what kind of changes it is expected to bring about in our daily lives. The talk will address the near & long term impact of this technology and how it paves way for different disciplines to come together for the next major paradigm shift in Manufacturing. In order to bring out the challenges involved in Nanotechnology research, we will take the example of an ongoing effort in the Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Bombay on the development of an integrated system to provide point-of-care diagnostic support for cardiovascular diseases. The system under development monitors the molecular markers to detect cardiac attacks, especially the incipient cardiac attacks that go undetected before major/fatal attacks occur. The system comprises of "infarcSens" or "iSens", which is a cantilever & molecular FET based affinity biosensor array for sensing myocardial infarction & subsequent cardiac status prognosis, using a suite of molecular markers. The sensing electronics and the associated data management software, for tracking the markers with time required for creating an epidemiological database, is also currently being developed. A multidisciplinary team from the departments of Electrical, Bio-school, Chemistry, Material Science and Mechanical Engineering is currently working on this project, which is initiated as part of the NPSM programme by the Govt of India.

About the speaker:

V. Ramgopal Rao obtained his doctorate from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universitaet der Bundeswehr Munich, Germany in 1997 after his post-graduate studies at IIT Bombay. After a two year post-doctoral research at the University of California Los Angeles, he joined IIT Bombay, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He is also the Chief Investigator for the Centre for Nanoelectronics project at IIT Bombay. Dr. Rao has over 180 publications in the area of Electron Devices & Nanoelectronics in refereed international journals and conference proceedings and holds three patents. Prof. Rao received the coveted Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences in 2005 from the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh for his work on Nano-scale electron devices. He is a also a recipient of the 2004 Swarnajayanti Fellowship award from DST, the 2007 IBM Faculty award and the 2008 MRSI -ICSC Superconductivity & Materials Science Gold Medal. He is an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices in the CMOS Devices and Technology area and serves on the Editorial boards of IETE Journal of Research, The Open Applied Physics Journal, and the 'Recent Patents in Electrical Engineering" published by the Bentham Science Publishers. Dr. Rao is a Distinguished Lecturer (DL), IEEE Electron Devices Society, a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow, IETE. Prof. Rao currently serves as the Vice-Chair IEEE Asia-Pacific Regions/Chapters Subcommittee.
For more information on Prof. Rao's current research interests, please visit: http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~rrao.

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Prateek Raj

Manager, Lecture Series

Techfest 2008

+91 98201 16174

prateek[at]techfest[dot]org