IIT-Kanpur prof bags G D Birla Award for Scientific Research

IIT-Kanpur professor Sanjay Mittal has bagged the prestigious G D Birla Award for Scientific Research for 2016.
48-year-old Mittal, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, has been chosen for his contribution in the area of Mechanics, the K K Birla Foundation said in a statement.
Mittal has made significant contribution to development of finite element algorithms for high performance computing (HPS).
Mittal's most significant contribution has been in the area of Bluff Body Flows (flows past blunt bodies associated with large unsteady separation and leading to large fluid forces). He is among a very few people in India who have worked on and used Finite Element Analysis for fluid flows.

He was instrumental in establishing the HPC facility, primarily funded by DST, at IIT-Kanpur.
Mittal did his B.Tech from IIT-Kanpur in 1988 after which he got enrolled at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities for MS programme. He then received his Ph.D and worked as a research associate under Prof Tayfun E Tezduyar.

After working for two years at Army High Performance Computing Centre, he returned to India and joined IIT-Kanpur in 1994 as an Assistant Professor.
Mittal has also been awarded with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology.
G D Birla Award for Scientific Research, instituted in 1991, seeks to recognise Indian scientists aged below 50 living and working in India for their outstanding contribution to any branch of science and technology. It carries a cash prize of Rs 2.5 lakh.

The selection of the award is made by a board comprising eminent scientists.