Pradeep Sindhu Chair
Mr. Pradeep Sindhu(BT/EE/1974) is the CEO & Founder of data center technology company, Fungible. Known for his entrepreneurial skills, Mr. Sindhu is a renowned name in technology development & innovation. He founded Juniper Networks in 1996 in California where he served as the Chief Scientist and CTO for over 20 years. He played an instrumental role in the architecture, design and development of M40 router.
Mr. Sindhu is one of the leading donors of IIT Kanpur. He established Pradeep Sindhu Foundation, which supports Pradeep Sindhu Chair. The Chair has been instituted for the path-breaking research in the field of Mathematics & Statistics.
Current Occupant
Prof. Raj Shekhar Gannavarpu
(Sep. 2025-Sep. 2028)
Dr. Rajshekhar Gannavarpu from the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kanpur. His research interests focus on developing robust computational optical imaging and microscopy techniques for diverse applications in precision metrology including non-contact nanoscale surface topography, sub-micron non-destructive deformation testing, automated and high throughput surface defect detection, label-free imaging of biological cells and quantitative flow visualization.
He earned his Bachelor of Engineering from Government Engineering College, Raipur, his M.Tech from IIT Kanpur, and his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America). Dr. Gannavarpu has been recognized with the National NDT Award from the Indian Society for Non-Destructive Testing and the SERB Early Career Research Award.
Former Occupant
Prof. Dattatraya H. Dethe
April 2022- April 2025
Prof. Dattatraya H. Dethe, Department of Chemistry, research interests include biomimetic total synthesis of natural products, development of enantioselective metal catalysed new C-C and C-X bond forming reactions. Prof. Dethe and his group has made outstanding contributions in "Asymmetric total synthesis of biologically active and architecturally complex natural products and development of novel techniques to the synthesis of optically active forms of many compounds of significance to medicinal chemistry". He is fellow of National Academy of Sciences (FNASc), recipient of CSIR young scientist award in Chemical Sciences (2011), OPPI young scientist award (2011), AVRA young scientist award (2014) , Young Associate of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (2011-2014), recipient of CRSI bronze medal (2020) and SERB-STAR award (2020). He earned his doctorate in synthetic organic chemistry from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2005.