DR. PRABHU RAJAGOPAL
Professor in Mechanical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Prabhu Rajagopal is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and an Associate of the Centre for Nondestructive Evaluation at IIT Madras (IITM). After graduating from IIT Madras in 2003 with a Dual Degree Masters in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in Intelligent Manufacturing, he obtained his PhD in Ultrasonic NDE from Imperial College London, UK in 2007. As a post-doctoral researcher, he developed advanced computational tools for inspection of welds on a Rolls Royce funded project, also at Imperial (2008-2010). Joining IITM in Dec 2010, Dr. Rajagopal is currently Principal or Co-Investigator about 15 agency and industry sponsored projects, with a total value of over 15 Crore INR (about half of that as PI), and has contributed over 140 technical articles in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings and 12 Indian patent filings.
He serves on the editorial board of ISNT Journal of NDE and is the Principal IITM Member on National Standardization Committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards and engages actively with industry. His areas of interest include strategies for inspection of structures under challenging conditions, and high resolution ultrasonic imaging using structured and topographic metamaterials.
His research is strongly collaborative and international, with joint projects/publications with groups from universities such as U.Nairobi, Kenya, Swinburne UT, Australia (with whom he has a joint PhD student), NTU Singapore, ZUT Poland, U. Warwick UK, U. Bordeaux France, Michigan State USA and ETS Montreal, Canada. He is a co-founding Director of the underwater and submersible robotics Startup Planys Technologies Pvt. Ltd which licenses his IP filing on automated submerged pipeline inspections. His work has been recognized by the Indian Society for NDT through the National Young Scientist Award and the Institution of Engineers (India) through the National Design Award, both for the year 2016.
More recently, he was awarded the prestigious ISSS Young Scientist Award by Institute of Smart Structures and Systems, IISc Bangalore, in recognition of his work on NDE & SHM. He is co-recipient of the prestigious DRDO Academy Excellence Award for ‘Outstanding and Internationally recognized contribution in the field of NDT in collaboration with DRDO Laboratories leading to innovative and implementable products for DRDO Stakeholders’ as an Associate of the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation, IIT Madras (Award for year 2015, received in April 2017). He was awarded the Gandhian Technology Innovation award for 2018 for a project developing super-resolution imaging systems conferred by BIRAC-SRISTI.