NSF Director to Speak at GW Tomorrow

Subra Suresh will discuss global science and engineering in lecture open to the university community.

October 3, 2012

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Subra Suresh, director of the National Science Foundation, will speak in the Marvin Center Continental Ballroom at 2 p.m. tomorrow. The lecture, titled “Global Science and Engineering: Opportunities and Challenges,” is free and open to the George Washington community.

A renowned researcher and academic leader, Dr. Suresh was nominated by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as NSF director in September 2010. NSF is the only government science agency charged with advancing all fields of fundamental science and engineering research and related education.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to hear from the director of the National Science Foundation, who plays a major role in the advancement of basic research in our country,” said Leo Chalupa, vice president for research. “I encourage everyone with an interest in science to attend – students and staff as well as faculty.”

Prior to joining NSF, Dr. Suresh served as the dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research on the mechanical properties of structural and functional materials, innovations in materials design and characterization, and discoveries of possible connections between cellular nanomechanical processes and human disease states have shaped new fields at the intersection of traditional disciplines. He has co-authored more than 240 journal articles, registered 21 patents and written three widely used materials science books.

Dr. Suresh earned a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; a master’s degree from Iowa State University; and a Doctor of Science from MIT. Following postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the faculty at Brown University in 1983 and was promoted to full professor in 1989. He joined MIT in 1993 as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and served as head of MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering from 2000 to 2006.

At MIT, Suresh helped create new state-of-the-art laboratories, the MIT Transportation Initiative and the Center for Computational Engineering; led MIT's efforts in establishing the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Center; and oversaw the recruitment of a record number of women faculty members in engineering.

Since joining NSF, he has established several new initiatives, including INSPIRE (Integrative NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education), PEER (Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research in collaboration with USAID), the NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative, the NSF Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) Program and the NSF Innovation Corps.

Under Dr. Suresh's leadership, NSF hosted a Global Summit on Scientific Merit Review earlier this year that included the participation of the heads of leading science funding agencies from nearly 50 countries.

Dr. Suresh has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as academies in Spain, Germany and India. He has been elected a fellow or honorary member of all the major materials research societies in the United States and India. Also among Dr. Suresh’s honors are seven honorary doctorate degrees from universities in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and India.  

For more information or to RSVP, email Andrea Phillippe in the Office of the Vice President for Research at [email protected].