The Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India has awarded the prestigious Young Faculty Research Fellowship under Visvesvaraya PhD scheme for Electronics and IT for the year 2015-16 to Prof. Maneesha Ramesh and Prof. Shyam Diwakar of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. ‎The Visveswaraya‬ scheme gives thrust to R&D, creates an innovative ecosystem and enhances India’s competitiveness in knowledge intensive sectors.

Prof. Krishnashree Achuthan, Dean PG Programs, said, “Only 200 such awards will be given over 5 years by DeitY. This is indeed a noteworthy recognition for Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.”

Prof. (Dr.) Maneesha V. Ramesh, the recipient of DeitY’s Young Faculty Research fellowship award, is the Director & Professor of Amrita Center for Wireless Networks and Applications (AmritaWNA). She has led several international and national funded projects in wireless technologies and had set up the first landslide detection and warning systems in India. Her team has also developed novel low-cost biomedical devices and set up smart hydro and smart energy systems in rural India as part of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s Live-in-Labs®. She is also the Dean, Amrita Center for International Programs.

Dr. Shyam Diwakar, the other recipient of DeitY’s Young Faculty Research fellowship award, is Principal Investigator and Lab Director of Computational Neuroscience and Neurophysiology Laboratory at Amrita School of Biotechnology where he is an Associate Professor. With brain modeling as the focus, his lab studies the physiology of brain cells and circuits to understand brain’s function for predicting neurological disorders and for brain-inspired robotics. He was also awarded the NVIDIA Innovation award on December 16, 2015 for his computational neuroscience work on GPUs.