October 20, 2010
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore
A delegation from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham traveled to the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The Amrita team including Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan, Dr. Maneesha Ramesh and Dr. Shyam Diwakar met with faculty in several areas.
Ranked as one of the best universities in Europe in the fields of computer sciences, engineering and technology, EPFL is home to many renowned professors. Below is the team report’s about their meeting with some of these professors.
Our visit began with the world-renowned Brain-Mind Institute inside the EPFL campus. Prof. Wulfram Gerstner, whose book on Spiking Neural Networks has inspired some of us at Amrita, suggested common models that we could use at our Computational Neurosciences lab.
Following this meeting, we met with Prof. Melanie Blokesch of the Life Sciences Institute. The Institute expressed an interest in having our undergraduate students for summer internships.
Another meeting with Prof. Henry Markram of the Blue Brain Project focused on this initiative to reverse engineer the brain, to explore how it functions. We enjoyed the special 3D presentation of neocortical simulations. As one of the most well-funded neurophysiology labs in the world, Prof. Markram’s facility has a sophisticated 12-well patch setup and two supercomputers including the IBM Bluegene.
Felix Schurmann, a senior post-doc there, led us through the lab visit.
We also met with Dr. Pramod Rastogi of Environmental Engineering and Civil Engineering.
Our last meeting was with Prof. Michael Graetzel at the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. Prof. Michael is no stranger to Amrita. He was at our Coimbatore campus earlier this year to participate in a conference on Solar Energy. Read News »
Having pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic materials and their optoelectronic applications, Dr. Graetzel discovered a new type of solar cell (now named Graetzel cell) based on dye sensitized mesoscopic oxide particles. He also pioneered the use of nanomaterials in lithium ion batteries.
Prof. Graetzel emphasized that he was impressed with the activities of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, that were inspired by Chancellor Amma. Suggesting options for solar-powered projects, he welcomed the opportunity of having Amrita students for project internships.
This recent winner of the acclaimed Millennium Technology Award expressed his interest to visit Amrita once again.
