User:LeeHerring/sandbox

Dr. Subra Suresh is the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a US federal government agency that supports fundamental (basic) research across all disciplines of science and engineering and related education. A distinguished engineer and scientist, Suresh is on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was Dean of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering.

In June 2010, Suresh was nominated by US President Barack Obama to be the Director of the National Science Foundation and was unanimously confirmed by the US Senate in September 2010. As director, he leads an independent federal agency that has an annual (US)$7-billion budget; its programs and initiatives are intended to keep the United States at the forefront of science and engineering, empower future generations of scientists and engineers, and foster economic growth and innovation. NSF funds discovery, learning, innovation, and research infrastructure to boost US leadership in all aspects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics research and education. In 2011, NSF supported more than 200,000 individuals in 1,800 institutions in every state in the United States and engaged more than 300,000 scientists, engineers, and educators in its peer review process.

NSF
Since joining NSF, Suresh has established several new initiatives including, among others, INSPIRE (Integrative NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education); PEER (Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research, in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development [USAID]); SAVI (Science Across Virtual Institutes); the NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative; and the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps).

Suresh is a member of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a cabinet-level council comprising federal agency heads and cabinet secretaries. He also co-chairs the NSTC Committee on Science and the Committee on STEM (Science, Techology, Engineering and Mathematics) Education.

In response to an invitation from the White House, and with support from the US Department of State, NSF will host an international summit to begin to develop shared global principles and procedures to promote high standards in scientific merit review. This Merit Review Summit will convene in Washington, DC, in May 2012.

MIT
Prior to assuming his position as director of NSF, Suresh had been MIT's Dean of Engineering. Suresh began his tenure as dean in July 2007 and had held MIT faculty appointments in Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering, and Health Sciences and Technology.

Suresh headed MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and his experimental research focuses on modeling the mechanical properties of structural and functional materials, innovations in materials design and characterization, and discoveries of possible connections between cellular nanomechanical processes and human disease states. Some of this work has spawned new fields in the fertile inderdisciplinary intersections between traditional disciplines in engineering, physical sciences, life sciences, and medicine. More than 100 students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars have been members of his research group, and many of them now occupy prominent positions in academia, industry, and government worldwide.

In his leadership roles at MIT, Suresh helped create new state-of-the-art laboratories, the MIT Transportation Initiative, and the Center for Computational Engineering; led MIT’s efforts in establishing the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Center; and oversaw the recruitment of a record number of women faculty in engineering.

Brown University
Suresh joined Brown University in December 1983 as Assistant Professor of Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in July 1986 and to Professor in July 1989. In 1985, he was selected to receive the White House Presidential Young Investigator Award administered by the National Science Foundation. Prior to and during his tenure at Brown University, Suresh received many other honors including: The Hardy Gold Medal “for exceptional promise of a successful career in the broad field of metallurgy by a metallurgist under the age of 30,” and the 1985 Matthewson Gold Medal from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) for the best paper published in "Metallurgical Transactions", and the 1992 Ross Coffin Purdy Award from the American Ceramic Society for the best paper published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society during 1990. In 1991, he authored Fatigue of Materials, a book published by Cambridge University Press and that has remained a classic in the field for two decades. It has been adapted as a textbook or a reference book by thousands of students and scientists and, according to Google Scholar, has been translated into Chinese and Japanese and has been cited more than 2,400 times.

Publications, Patents
Suresh is the author or co-author of more than 240 research articles in international journals, co-editor of five books, and co-inventor on 22 US and international patent applications. He has authored or co-authored three widely used material science books: Fatigue of Materials, Fundamentals of Functionally Graded Materials, and Thin Film Materials. He is one of the most-cited scientists in materials science, according to Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information. In 2011, Science Watch/Thomson Reuters selected Suresh as one of the top-100 scientists for the decade 2000-2010 in its world-wide ranking of the field of Materials Science.

Honors
In 2011, Suresh received the Padma Shri award, one of the highest civilian honors in India. Other honors include the 2006 Acta Materialia Gold Medal; the 2007 European Materials Medal, the highest honor conferred by the Federation of European Materials Societies (he was the first scientist based outside Europe to receive this medal); the 2008 Eringen Medal of the Society of Engineering Science; the 2011 General President’s Gold Medal from the Indian National Science Congress; the 2011 Nadai Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; and the 2012 R.F. Mehl Award from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. Suresh has been awarded five honorary doctorate degrees. In 2006, Technology Review magazine selected his work on nanobiomechanics as one of the top-10 emerging technologies that "will have a significant impact on business, medicine or culture."

Suresh has been elected to the US National Academy of Engineering; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering; German National Academy of Sciences; Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences; Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) in Trieste, Italy; German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina); and Indian National Academy of Engineering.

He is an honorary fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (Bangalore) and an honorary member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.

Suresh has been elected a fellow or honorary fellow by all major materials societies in the United States and India, including the Materials Research Society, the American Society for Materials International; The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society; the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the American Ceramic Society; the Indian Institute of Metals; and the Materials Research Society of India.

Education

 * Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai (BTech) May 1977
 * Iowa State University (MS) May 1979
 * Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ScD) August 1981