Soumitro Banerjee

Soumitro Banerjee (born 17 October 1960) is an Indian electrical engineer and physicist and former acting Director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. He is known for his studies on border collision bifurcations and nonlinear phenomena in power electronic circuits and is an elected fellow of all three major Indian science academies: the National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian Academy of Sciences, and Indian National Science Academy. He is also a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, West Bengal Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 2003.

Biography

Soumitro Banerjee, born on 17 October 1960 at Kolkata in the Indian state of West Bengal, did his graduate studies at Bengal Engineering College of the University of Calcutta from where he earned a BE degree in electrical engineering in 1981 and moved to the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi to gain an MTech in Energy Studies in 1983. After enrolling for PhD at IIT Delhi, he took up the post of a lecturer at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1985 and while serving there he received his doctoral degree in 1988 for his thesis, Magnetic Energy Storage Units for Improvement of Power System Stability. He served IIT Kharagpur till 2009 during which period held the positions of an assistant professor (1990–98), associate professor (1998–2003) and a professor. In 2009, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata where he serves as a professor.

Legacy

Banerjee's researches have been focused on nonlinear dynamics and bifurcation theory and his experiments and analyses widened the understanding of border collision bifurcations. Google Scholar and ResearchGate, online article repositories of scientific articles, have listed many of them. Besides, he has made several presentations and has authored three books, Dynamics for Engineers, which details modelling and analysis of dynamical systems, and Wind Electrical Systems, the first Indian book on wind energy conversion, and Research Methodology in Natural Sciences. He has also edited a book, Nonlinear Phenomena in Power Electronics: Bifurcations, Chaos, Control, and Applications, in which he has written a number of chapters.

Banerjee was associated with three journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; he served as the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II (2003–05), the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I (2006–07) and the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society Newsletter (2010-2020). he has also presented a number of papers at various editions of the conference. He is the general secretary of Breakthrough Science Society, a non-governmental organization committed to the cultivation of a scientific bent of mind among people and sits in the editorial board of its journal. He is also the editor of Prakriti, a Bengali language science magazine.

Awards and honors Banerjee received the Boyscast Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology in 1996 which enabled him to carry out collaborative research at the University of Maryland. The next year, Thomson Scientific included him in the list of top 250 scientists in the world with the highest citation count in the Engineering category and awarded him the 2004 Citation Laureate Award. The same year, the Indian National Academy of Engineering elected him as a fellow and he became a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences He featured in the 2011 fellowship list of the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology and the elected fellowship of The World Academy of Sciences reached him in 2012, The Department of Science and Technology selected him for the J. C. Bose National fellowship for two terms, in 2015 and 2020.

Selected work Books

Soumitro Banerjee (August 2022). Research Methodology for Natural Sciences, IISc Press, Bengaluru, India.

Selected Articles

Presentations

Outreach Bringing Science to People, The Room of Lives Podcast