KOCHI:
Dr P B Sunil Kumar, Director, Indian Institute of Technology, Palakkad has been selected for Prof. M V Pylee Award for the Distinguished Academician of India – 2019, by the Cochin University of Science and Technology.
The biennial award carrying a cash prize of One lakh rupees and a citation, is 10 th in the series which commenced in 1996, instituted in the name of the great management expert and Vice chancellor of the University, Prof. M V Pylee. The award is considered to be one of the best in the country for academicians from Universities and other educational/research institutions.
The award committee made the selection from three candidates short listed out of 17 candidates nominated by 23 academicians and other eminent personalities. The excellence of Dr. Sunil Kumar as a teacher, researcher and institution builder brought him the glory.
After completing degree and post graduation from Calicut University, Sunil Kumar took his Ph D from Raman Research Institute, Bangalore University in the year 1994. Thereafter, he continued research as Post Doctoral Fellow in Raman Research Institute, IMSc, Chennai, Max Planck Institute, Teltow, Germany, etc. till 1999. Dr. Sunil Kumar took to teaching as Assistant Professor in 1999 and has been a professor since 2006. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at University of Southern Denmark during 2005- 2006.
In addition to being member of various academic/research bodies, Dr. Sunil Kumar has been a successful teacher and researcher with 15 students having already taken Ph. D under his guidance and publishing around 69 papers including 59 in refereed international journals. Electrodynamics,
Statistical physics, Classical Mechanics, Simple and Complex Fluids, Computational Physics and Numerical Methods, Parallel Programming, etc were the courses he handled.
A video course, on Numerical methods and programming, with 38 lectures, is available through NPTEL. He has also co-authored an NPTEL web course on the same topic. He has held many teaching and administrative positions in various IITs and was the Professor-in charge of IIT, Palakkad
from 2015 and has been the Director from 2017 onwards, controlling all the activities related to the infrastructure development, staff recruitment, besides all other academic and administrative matters.
Prof. M V Pylee had actively took part in the selection of candidates for the award till the last one and this is the first selection of the awardee after the demise of Prof. M V Pylee. The awardees hitherto has been Prof. M N Srinivas(1996), Prof. J V Narlikar(1998), Dr M S Valiathan(2000), Dr K Venkatasubramanian(2003), Dr V N RajasekharanPillai(2006), Dr. K L Sebastian(2009), Dr Lalji Singh(2012), Dr Jancy James(2015) and Dr Kuncheria P Isaac(2017).
