Profile of Subra Suresh

During his long and distinguished career, Subra Suresh has made crucial contributions to the field of engineering. While finishing up high school in India in the 1970s, however, Suresh was not even sure of going to college, let alone becoming an engineer. Nonetheless, Suresh decided to take a shot at the entrance examination for the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. “A month before my exam, I bought a book to prepare and worked through some practice questions and just thought, go try it,” Suresh says. “To my surprise, I got in.” His degree in mechanical engineering from Indian Institutes of Technology Madras would turn out to be the starting point of a wide-ranging research career. Suresh’s research interests would eventually span engineering, basic science, and medicine. His multidisciplinary work led to elected memberships in all three US National Academies: The National Academy of Engineering in 2002, the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and the National Academy of Medicine in 2013. Suresh has held several prestigious positions, from being dean of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Engineering and president of Carnegie Mellon University to leading the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States. Now President of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Suresh continues to push forward in research with his recent work on deforming nanoscale diamond. In his Inaugural Article (1), Suresh and his colleagues show computationally that it is possible to make nanoscale diamond behave like a metal with respect to select properties, which would open up a wide array of applications in microelectronics, optoelectronics, and solar energy.