Prof. R. I. Sujith received his Ph. D. adorned with the “top graduate student in the college of engineering” award from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1994 under the supervision of Prof. Ben T Zinn. He is currently the D. Srinivasan Chair Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He is a recipient of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and the Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at the Technical University of Munich. Prof. Sujith was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Spray and Combustion Dynamics from 2009-2015, and is at present a member of the editorial advisory board of the interdisciplinary journal Chaos. He won the Young Engineer Award of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He has also been awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowship and the J. C. Bose Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology India. He isa fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Indian Academy of Sciences, and has been conferred the title of “TUM Ambassador” by the Technical University of Munich. Prof. Sujith currently works on the application of dynamical systems and complex systems theory to study and mitigate thermoacoustic instability.Dr. Samadhan A. Pawar received his Ph. D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras under the supervision of Prof. R. I. Sujith and Prof. Mahesh V. Panchagnula. He was conferred the ‘Institute Research Award’ from IIT Madras (2018) in recognition of his doctoral research work on the application of synchronization theory to thermoacoustic systems. Dr. Pawar has also been awarded the ‘Young Scientist Award 2021’ by the International Society for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (ISEES) in view of his impressive contributions to the research field at a very young age. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Sujith’s lab at IIT Madras.His work highlights the maiden experimental and theoretical characterization of the onset of thermoacoustic instability and its control using dynamical systems theory and complex systems theory.
