From OAT to the World: The IITM Couple - Who Never Left IIT Madras Behind

Mr. Ashok Krishna entered IIT Madras in 1969 as a 16-year-old in the five-year Chemical Engineering programme, paying just a thousand rupees a year for tuition and living on a modest mess bill in the Mandakini and later the Saraswathi hostel. Between one-week workshop cycles with German instructors, hostel mess strikes, and late-night study sessions, there was plenty of fun and camaraderie, and those years quietly shaped his values, discipline, and conviction that hard work must always match talent.

What began as a fascination in a Chemical Reaction Engineering classroom under the iconic Professor Y. B. G. Varma led Mr. Krishna to the US, at the University of Massachusetts, where he finished a PhD in just 21 months, so impactful that a chapter from his thesis eventually appeared in the very undergraduate textbook he had used at IITM. That moment, seeing his work in “Chapter 21, in the CRE book by Octave Levenspiel,” felt like life looping back to its source for him.

(i). 1974 Steering Committee Photo: Ashok Krishna (then S. Krishnaswamy) sits in the front row, in long hair. (fourth right from the viewer’s perspective).

(ii). Another 1974 Steering Committee Photo: Ashok Krishna sits front row. (far right from the viewer’s perspective).

Ms. Krishna’s Quiet Courage

Almost a decade later, Ms. Krishna joined IIT Madras in 1978, stepping onto the same campus as one of only six girls in a batch of around 250. Clearing JEE with a high rank at a time when very few women even attempted it, she found strength in knowing that every girl on campus was there by choice and conviction, not by parental pressure.

Her five years were filled with group study sessions in Sarayu, where she discovered how much clearer tough concepts became when friends pooled their doubts. As a member of both the table tennis and shuttle teams, she travelled in special “sports bogies” to Inter-IIT meets in Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, and Kharagpur, helping IITM win overall honours and learning the joy of carrying her institute’s name onto distant courts. Those foundations took her to a PhD at UC Berkeley and then to a global career starting up 18 grassroots chemical plants, including hydrocrackers that helped clean fuels around Mathura and Chennai.

(iii) Ms. Kamala's Batch Memories: Additional photos from Kamala Krishna's 1978-83 B.Tech Chemical Engineering cohort at IIT Madras, shared by Ashok Krishna in January 2026.

An OAT Proposal and a Shared Life

For all their achievements, the memory they treasure most is set under the open sky of IITM’s Open Air Theatre. In 1981, Mr. Krishna was back on campus to teach a short module on Chemical Reaction Engineering; Ms. Krishna was a 20-year-old fourth-year Chemical Engineering student and star tennis player.

Needing textbooks for his classes, Mr. Krishna walked to Sarayu, asked for Ms. Krishna by name, and they ended up talking long enough that she and her classmates began attending his lectures “for the subject”, and, perhaps, a little for the teacher. Over two weeks, post-class conversations on campus benches became their quiet version of dating in a time when holding hands in public was unthinkable.

On a Saturday night after an OAT movie, with his departure and family-arranged meetings looming, Mr. Krishna finally asked her to marry him. Ms. Krishna was stunned, “I’m only in fourth year,” she protested, but agreed to give her answer within a few days. She agreed on the firm condition that she would finish her degree before they married. Today, more than 40 years later, OAT remains, for them, the emotional centre of campus; a place where two lives quietly changed direction. 

 

As their careers grew, Mr. Krishna spent 40 years at Chevron, Ms. Krishna nearly 30 in R&D, and they never drifted far from IIT Madras in spirit or action. When he rose to an executive role in the early 2000s, Mr. Krishna decided it was time to match gratitude with concrete support, first by participating in a candid external review that pushed the Chemical Engineering department to upgrade its labs. He then channeled corporate funds to create the Chevron Lab and set up scholarships and teaching assistantships that still support students on campus.

A chance conversation with a young faculty member, Professor Preeti Aghalyam, led him to secure funds from Chevron to build a high-pressure reactor system, enabling generations of PhD work in coal gasification research. Alongside this, Mr. and Ms. Krishna endowed an institute chair in honour of Professor M. S. Ananth, contributed to improving Sarayu and Saras hostels, and kept returning to speak to students about what it truly means to live a life in Chemical Engineering, while continuing annual giving to the campus through the IITM Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

In recent years, Mr. Krishna helped seed the IIT Madras Energy Consortium and mentored startups like Detect Technologies and Planys, opening doors in global organizations. For both of them, the “joy of giving” is simple: having once received a world-class education for almost nothing, they now see giving back, not just money, but time, networks, and experience, as completing a circle that began with a bicycle ride into campus decades ago.

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Dr. Ashok S. Krishna obtained his B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1974, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts. His work on “Diffusional Influences on Catalyst Deactivation Rates” is now part of undergraduate texts in Chemical Reaction Engineering. He also completed his MBA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1983. Dr. Kamala Krishna, the wife of Dr. Ashok Krishna and also an alumnus of IITM, has a profound affection for her alma mater. Dr. Kamala Krishna did her B.Tech in Chemical Engineering (1978-83) with an illustrious career in chemical engineering and Catalysis R&D, culminating as General Manager of Process Research at Chevron (1992-2020). Dr. Kamala Krishna completed her MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh between 1983 and 1985. She then pursued her PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1985 to 1992. The Krishnas are also the proud parents of two fine young men.

(iv). Mr. Ashok Krishna, using his grandfather’s name, Mr. S. Krishnaswamy, signs off with a "Kich" caricature, pairing his signature with all the articles in Campastimes: one of IIT Madras's monthly student magazine staples from the 1960s-90s, blending satire, campus news, and illustrations like these.

(v). Dr. Ashok and Dr. Kamala Krishna, at the IIT Madras class of 1974 alumni reunion at the Mysore Reunion, January 2023.