10 IIT Kharagpur students selected for research internship scholarship in foreign varsities

Kolkata: An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, a hedge fund researcher in New York, has come forward to support 10 meritorious students of the premier educational institution for their summer internship in reputed foreign universities. The scholarship would facilitate the scholars to pursue their research internship at premier universities in the US, the UK, Belgium, Canada, and Germany.

An institute spokesperson said Tuesday that Dr. Mukund Padmanabhan, who had worked at IBM T J Watson Research Lab after a BS in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering in IIT KGP and MS from the University of California, has donated funds through his US-based charitable organisation -Guru Krupa Foundation (GKF)- in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur Foundation USA.

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Ten students were selected by the IIT KGP selection committee for a total scholarship award of US $ 45,000. “These summer programmes add value to IIT Kharagpur academia and it is my pleasure, as an alumnus, to be able to provide these internships to the current students that will further contribute to their holistic development,” Padmanabhan, a researcher at Renaissance Technologies, said. Manav Nitin Kapadnis, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, and one of the recipients of the scholarship said, “As a student pursuing my passion for artificial Intelligence and natural language processing, I got the opportunity to work on improving ChatGPT during my internship at Inria Paris."

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IIT Kharagpur Director, Prof. V K Tewari, said that the scholarship has opened doors to new possibilities for meritorious students. “This kind of scholarship provides them a practical notion about research development and implementation of ideas in terms of global industry expertise," he said. Apart from this, 15 students from the departments of Agricultural and Food Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Biotechnology, Aerospace Engineering, and Electrical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur have also been awarded the IIT Kharagpur Foundation Scholarship 2023 funded by IITKGP Foundation USA, the spokesperson said.