Born in Maldaha, West Bengal (India), Prof. Subir Kumar Saha, completed most of his school studies from Vidyasagar Vidyapith, Midnapore (also in West Bengal). He completed his BE (Mech.) from RE College (now NIT), Durgapur, in 1983, followed by his Master’s from IIT Kharagpur in 1985. He obtained his Ph D degree from McGill University, Canada, in 1991, and immediately joined the R&D Center of Toshiba Corporation in Japan. At Toshiba, he worked on space robot dynamics. In 1995, he returned to IIT Madras as a visiting faculty, before joining IIT Delhi in 1996 as an Assistant Professor. Since 2006, he is a Professor at IIT Delhi. Prof. Saha is a recipient of the Humboldt Fellowship and spent nine months during 1999–2000 at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He has also been a visiting faculty to several universities abroad, e.g., McGill University, Canada; Monash University, Australia; and University of Verona, Italy.

Prof. Saha is actively engaged in teaching, research, and technology development. He established the SAE-IIT Delhi Chapter in 1997, and the Mechatronics Laboratory at IIT Delhi in July 2001. His research, consultancy, and training activities with many private companies like Asahi India, Sona Steering, Minda-Huf, SAMTEL Colour Tubes, and public sectors like BHEL, CEPC, and government agencies like DST, MIT, CWDB are a clear indication of the industries’ confidence on Prof. Saha’s commitment. Prof. Saha has to his credit more than 125 research publications in reputed journals and conference proceedings.

Two of Prof. Saha’s recent interests are the following: (1) Popularizing the concept of engineering education through participation in robotics competitions. For example, he has been guiding the student teams of IIT Delhi since 2003 to take part in Doordarshan–Robocon competitions. The team guided by him was the champion of 2007 and represented India in the international competition held in Hanoi, Vietnam. To strengthen the concept, Prof. Saha has launched a lecture series named as Robotics [AT]? during his stay in IIT Madras from Dec. 2006 to Dec. 2007. So far, he has delivered eight lectures at different engineering colleges/institutes. (2) In order to popularize engineering problems faced by the rural industries of India, e.g., the carpet industries, amongst the students of IITs and other engineering colleges, he has been formulating the rural technical problems as research problems and solving them using modern tools, be they software or theory. The concept has led to several national and international journal publications, and a PhD thesis that is expected to come out as a special book in 2009 by a reputed international publisher.

The author can be reached at saha@mech.iitd.ac.in.