Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Interests: Inertia, Mach's Principle, Big Bang Age: 78
Amitabha Ghosh earned a BSME in 1962, MSME in 1964 and PhD in Engineering in 1969, all from Calcutta University. He received the University Gold Medal for highest standing in all branches of engineering. He was a lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur 1965-1970, Assistant Professor and finally Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur 1971-1997, and 1997-2002 Director of IIT Kharagpur, the oldest and largest of the IIT campuses. He has been a Senior Fellow of the Alexander von Humbnoldt Foundation in Germany since 1977, and is Fellow of the Institute of Engineers, Indian National Science Academy.
Professor Ghosh?s professional interst lies in the fields of Manufacturing Science and Engineering Mechanics. He discovered a number of interesting phenomena, one of the more interesting being the effect of magnetic fields on wear. He was among the first to observe chaos in mechanical systems, and conducted one of the first experiments in mechanical systems in 1979. He pioneered teaching and research in the field of Robotics in India in 1984, and in 1989 helped found the Centre for Robotics at IIT Kampur, where he inaugerated the first specialized postgraduate course in Robotics. He has published over 120 research papers and four books in India, the UK and the USA.
