Chair Professorship in Civil Engineering - Prof. P. Srinivasa Rao

Professor Pulugurta Srinivasa Rao (fondly known to his colleagues and students as Prof. P.S. Rao) joined Civil Engineering Department of IIT Madras in 1965 and was instrumental in commissioning the Structural Engineering Laboratory. He has handled a variety of UG and PG courses in Structural Engineering. The students always cherished his teaching and rated him as one of the excellent teachers. During his career at IIT Madras, Prof. Rao has shouldered many additional responsibilities: as the Head of the Structural Engineering Laboratory, HoD of Civil Engineering, Dean (ICSR), Dean (AC) and Member, BoG of IIT Madras. He was awarded the prestigious Alexander Von Humboldt Fellowship twice. With his penchant for deep fundamental understanding, he has guided 19 candidates for their Ph.D work and published more than 100 technical papers. Prof. Rao has contributed immensely through his research in the field of RCC and PSC, and many of his contributions have been incorporated in codes of practice, such as DIN 1045, Eurocode EN 1992, IS 456, IS 4998 and IRC 112. He has also provided his expertise as a structural consultant for several challenging engineering projects worldwide. His research and consultancy works included applications to the design of PSC railway sleepers, RC towers, chimneys, natural draft cooling towers, raft slabs, pile-rafts, shells and folded plates, stadia, and port and harbour structures. He continues to be an Advisor to the GVP group of educational institutions, which he helped found in 1997, and also as a Structural Engineering Consultant for a number of organizations.  The  contributions  of      Prof. Rao are truly immeasurable.

The Department of Civil Engineering proposes to create a Chair Professorship in the name of Prof. P.S. Rao, as an expression of our gratitude to a great teacher who actively contributed to the development of Department of Civil Engineering and IIT Madras in its formative years, and to honour his significant contributions to the Civil Engineering Profession. The Chair Professorship will enable the Department to identify and nominate academically high performing faculty of Civil Engineering. The target corpus aspired for making this Chair as a perpetually sustaining one is around Rs. 1 crore. We have already received generous pledges from former colleagues of Prof. P.S. Rao to the tune of Rs. 30 lakhs. We now invite Alumni of Civil Engineering Department of IIT Madras to contribute towards this initiative.

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