Prof. Laxmidhar Behera is the director of IIT Mandi and a senior professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Kanpur. He earned his B.Sc. (Engg) and M.Sc. (Engg) from NIT Rourkela and completed his Ph.D. from IIT Delhi in 1996. With postdoctoral research at the German National Research Center for Information Technology, he has over 28 years of experience in teaching and research. His expertise spans intelligent systems, control, vision-based robotics, warehouse automation, brain-computer interfaces, drone technology, and consciousness studies. He has led projects worth over ₹25 crores and collaborated with TCS, Renault Nissan, and BEL. Prof. Behera has supervised 31 Ph.D. students, 70+ master’s theses, authored three textbooks, and published over 380 papers. His book Intelligent Control of Robotic Systems won the Best Engineering Book Award (2020–21). He has collaborated with ETH Zurich, University of Texas San Antonio, and others. Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay is a principal research scientist at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Tsukuba, Japan. He did Ph.D. in IACS, Kolkata, 2005. From 2005 to 2008, he was an ICYS research fellow at NIMS, Japan. In 2008, he joined NIMS, built organic jelly-based artificial brain, quantum computer, molecular motor-based drugs, invented Dodecanogram for deep consciousness measurement, built Polyatomic time crystal-based Quantum cryptographic language, written a book “Nanobrain: The making of an artificial brain from a time crystal”, 2020. From 2013 to 2014 he was a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. He received the Hitachi Science and Technology award 2010, Inamori Foundation award 2011–2012, Kurata Foundation Award, and is a Sewa Society International member, Japan. He has published more than 100 papers, 23 patents, edited 17 books. Prof. Ganpati Ramanath is the John Tod Horton professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana in 1997, following degrees from IIT Madras and the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on structure-processing-property relationships in nanomaterials and interfaces for energy and electronics. He has published over 185 journal articles (h-index 53, ~12,000 citations), holds 9 US patents, and has delivered more than 235 invited talks globally. A co-founder of ThermoAura Inc., he served as the director of the NY State Center for Future Energy Systems and was an editor for IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology. His honors include Fellowships of MRS, APS, and AVS, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Humboldt Bessel Award. He has held visiting positions at institutions in Germany, Japan, Sweden, Australia, and India, including IISc Bangalore and RWTH Aachen.
