IIT Roorkee’s newly appointed director K K Pant says focus on NEP Vision 2030

NEW DELHI: The newly appointed director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, Professor Kamal Kishore Pant is targeting for the institute to reach among the top-tier institutions globally. Pant is also focusing on supporting the establishment of start-ups. Pant was former dean faculty and professor in the department of chemical engineering at IIT Delhi.

Pant has planned a step to develop Hierarchical Intelligent Cyber-Physical Ecosystems, which will enable collaboration between engineering, arts, and other sciences on a much larger scale than has been done before. The Institute is also planning to create new R&D infrastructure to promote IIT Roorkee as a significant hub for training a wider spectrum of international scholars and to forge global alliances addressing cutting-edge research and innovation.

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IIT Roorkee will focus on areas of Vision 2030 (Sustainable Clean and Green energy, Electric vehicles (EVs), renewables, rural industrialization, space, self-sufficiency in food production, distress-free healthcare, and digital India) that will result in employable or entrepreneurial engineers.

In the coming years, IIT Roorkee will focus on the fields such as Cyber Engineering, Societal Systems, Living Systems Engineering. Biomechatronic/Robotics Engineering, Cognitive Systems Engineering. Knowledge Engineering, Emergent/Complexity Engineering, and Multiscale Systems engineering.

IIT Roorkee director

Pant received his PhD (Chemical Engineering) degree from IIT Kanpur in 1997. He is a Fellow of the scientific academies INAE and NASI. He is also a leading expert on cutting-edge and futuristic technologies.

Pant is an adjunct faculty at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, a joint faculty at CRDT IIT Delhi, and honorary faculty at the University of Queensland in Australia. He was also ranked in the world's top 2% scientists.

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Additionally, Pant group’s research work has been awarded twice the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation (GYTI) award, as well as many other honors, such as the CHEMCON distinguished speaker award, Herdilia Award, Dr A V Rama Rao award for the best PhD supervision, and Dr S S Deshpande award, etc.

Sharing his thoughts, Pant said, "IIT Roorkee had celebrated its Sesquicentennial in October 1996 and now completed more than 175 years of its existence. And aligning with the institute’s vision, like all my contemporaries, we will work towards scaling greater heights to create a sustainable and equitable society through teaching of cutting-edge academic content using state-of-the-art methodologies and innovative research in science and technology."