Ramarathnam Narasimhan (born 1960) is an Indian materials engineer and a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his pioneering researches on

fracture mechanics Fracture mechanics is the field of mechanics concerned with the study of the propagation of cracks in materials. It uses methods of analytical solid mechanics to calculate the driving force on a crack and those of experimental solid mechanics t ...

and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. The

Council of Scientific and Industrial Research The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (IAST: ''vaigyanik tathā audyogik anusandhāna pariṣada''), abbreviated as CSIR, was established by the Government of India in September 1942 as an autonomous body that has emerged as the l ...

, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1999.

Biography

R. Narasimhan, born on 31 May 1960 in the south Indian state of

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is a States and union territories of India, state in southern India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, tenth largest Indian state by area and the List of states and union territories of India ...

, gained a graduate degree in engineering from the

Indian Institute of Technology, Madras Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. As one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), it is recognized as an Institute of National Importance and has be ...

in 1982 and moved to the US to join the California Institute of Technology from where he secured a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1983 and followed it up with a PhD in

Applied Mechanics Applied mechanics is the branch of science concerned with the motion of any substance that can be experienced or perceived by humans without the help of instruments. In short, when mechanics concepts surpass being theoretical and are applied and e ...

in 1986. His post-doctoral studies were also at Caltech at the laboratory of Ares J. Rosakis, simultaneously working as a faculty at the institute. On his return to India, he joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1987 where he stayed for four years before joining the Indian Institute of Science in 1991 and serves IISc as a professor at the department of mechanical engineering. During this period, he had three sabbaticals; once in Sweden at the

Royal Institute of Technology The KTH Royal Institute of Technology ( sv, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, lit=Royal Institute of Technology), abbreviated KTH, is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH conducts research and education in engineering and technolo ...

and twice in Singapore at the Institute for High Performance Computing, Singapore and at

National University of Singapore The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national public research university in Singapore. Founded in 1905 as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, NUS is the oldest autonomous university in the c ...

Legacy

Narasimhan's researches have been focused on the theoretical, computational and applied aspects of Solid Mechanics, Fracture Mechanics and Mechanics of Materials. During his post-doctoral days at Caltech, he worked with Rosakis on elastic-plastic solids with regard to crack initiation and growth and their studies on three-dimensional effects on elastic-plastic crack tip fields demonstrated the dominance of the effect ''at a distance of half the specimen thickness from the crack front''. He has also worked on the deformation and fracture behaviour of

bulk metallic glasses An amorphous metal (also known as metallic glass, glassy metal, or shiny metal) is a solid metallic material, usually an alloy, with disordered atomic-scale structure. Most metals are crystalline in their solid state, which means they have a high ...

and is credited with the development of a method for quantifying ''the micro-mechanics of mixed mode ductile fracture involving microvoid coalescence and

shear band A shear band (or, more generally, a 'strain localization') is a narrow zone of intense shearing strain, usually of plastic nature, developing during severe deformation of ductile materials. As an example, a soil (overconsolidated silty-clay) specime ...

''. Collaborating with Upadrasta Ramamurty, his colleague at IISc, he worked on fracture mechanics of bulk metallic glasses and these studies enabled them to identify the time scale of fracture as well as to propose an explanation for the nano-trenches. He has documented his researches in several articles;

ResearchGate ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by ''Nature'' and a 2016 article in ''Times Higher Education'' ...

and

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

, online repositories of scientific articles, have listed 103 and 141 of them respectively. Narasimhan is a former member of the

Science and Engineering Research Board Science and Engineering Research Board is a statutory body under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, established by an Act of the Parliament of India in 2009 ( SERB ACT,2008). The Board is chaired by the Secretary to t ...

of the Department of Science and Technology. He sits in the editorial boards of journals including Engineering Fracture Mechanics and Journal of Mechanics and Physics of Solids of

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...

, and the International Journal of Fracture of Springer. Besides, he is a former member of the editorial board of

Current Science ''Current Science'' is an English-language peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It was established in 1932 and is published by the Current Science Association along with the Indian Academy of Sciences. According to the ''Journal C ...

journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences. He has mentored a number of master's and doctoral scholars in their studies and has delivered several keynote or invited speeches including at the ''Complex Geometry and Operator Theory'' conference jointly organized by the

Indian Statistical Institute Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a higher education and research institute which is recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the 1959 act of the Indian parliament. It grew out of the Statistical Laboratory set up by Prasanta C ...

and Institute of Mathematical Sciences in December 2015.

Awards and honors

His work alongside Ares Rosakis at Caltech earned Narasimhan the Rudolph Kingslake Medal of the SPIE, an honor he shared with Rosakis and Alan Taylor Zehnder in 1988. The

awarded him the

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (SSB) is a science award in India given annually by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for notable and outstanding research, Applied science, applied or Fundamenta ...

, one of the highest Indian science awards in 1999. The Indian Academy of Sciences elected him as a fellow in 2000 and he became an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2002. A year later, the Indian Institute of Science awarded him the 2003 Prof. Rustom Choksi Award for Excellence in Research and he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2016. Narasimhan, who has been holding the J. C. Bose National Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology of India since 2010, is also an elected fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

Selected bibliography

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Notes

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Narasimhan, Ramarathnam Recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Engineering Science 1960 births Indian materials scientists Indian mechanical engineers Engineers from Tamil Nadu Tamil scientists IIT Madras alumni California Institute of Technology alumni California Institute of Technology faculty Academic staff of IIT Bombay Academic staff of the Indian Institute of Science Living people Fellows of the Indian National Academy of Engineering 20th-century Indian engineers