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NIU’s Biswa Nath Datta selected for Fulbright Distinguished Chair Award

October 1, 2015
Biswa Nath Datta

Biswa Nath Datta

Biswa Nath Datta, a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at NIU, begins one of the Fulbright Scholar Program’s most distinguished appointments this month.

Datta received the 2015 Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair Award to teach graduate students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur (IIT-KGP), India.

Additionally, during the four-month appointment, he will travel to prominent higher education institutions throughout the country to give guest lectures and take part in symposia and conferences.

Run by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Fulbright Program awards about 8,000 grants each year to graduate students, university faculty and researchers worldwide. But the program gives out only about 40 Distinguished Chair Awards to eminent scholars with significant publication and teaching records.

Datta’s research seeks out solutions to real-life, control-and-vibration engineering design and analysis. His mathematical and computational techniques aim to improve performance and design safety in autos, aircraft, bridges, buildings and highways.

In India, Datta’s Fulbright award will be administered by United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF), which will coordinate lectures on his current interdisciplinary research, “Computational and Optimization Methods for Inverse Quadratic Eigenvalue Problems in Active Vibration Control and Finite Element Model Updating.”

Locations for his lectures will include IIT-Delhi, IIT-Madras, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Gujarat, IIT- Guwahati, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata.

Professor Datta had previously received two Senior Fulbright Specialists Awards to visit and deliver lectures on his research at National University of Mongolia and several universities in Egypt.