Supriyo Datta


Supriyo Datta is an Indian born American researcher and author. A leading figure in the modeling and understanding of nano-scale electronic conduction, he has been called "one of the most original thinkers in the field of nanoscale electronics." He is currently the Thomas Duncan Distinguished professor at the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University. A recipient of the Frederick Emmons Terman Award from the American Society of Engineering Education in 1994, and the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1984, he is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012.
He was the Director of NASA Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing from 2002-2007. As an author, his books are widely used as original research and design work in the field of nanotechnology and electronic devices.

Early life and education

Dr. Datta did his schooling from Hindi High School in Kolkata, India. He was first in the whole West Bengal Board of Secondary Education exam in 1970. Datta received his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India in 1975. He then received both his MS and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977 and 1979 respectively.
In 1981, he joined Purdue University, where he is the Thomas Duncan Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering. He started his career in the field of ultrasonics and was selected by the Ultrasonics group as its outstanding young engineer to receive an IEEE Centennial Key to the Future Award and by the ASEE to receive the Terman Award for his book on Surface Acoustic Wave Devices.

Career

Since 1985 he has focused on current flow in nanoscale electronic devices and is well known for his contributions to spin electronics and molecular electronics. Datta’s most important contribution was the approach he pioneered for the description of quantum transport far from equilibrium, combining the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism of many-body physics with the Landauer formalism from Mesoscopic physics.

Awards

His approach to the problem of quantum transport has not only had a significant impact on nanoelectronics research but also on graduate and undergraduate curriculum development in the area. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society as well as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has received two IEEE technical field awards: the 2002 IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award and the 2008 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award.
In 2006 he won the "Herbert Newby McCoy Award", given by Purdue University to the faculty member... making the greatest contribution of the year to science. He received the Frederick Emmons Terman Award from the American Society of Engineering Education in 1994, the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, 1984 and the D.D.Ewing teaching award from the School of Electrical Engineering, Purdue University in 1983.

Books