Indian engineer wins highest Texas academic award for groundbreaking imaging technology
Indian computer engineer and professor Ashok Veeraraghavan, who resides in the United States, has received the highest academic honour in Texas, the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in engineering.
Veeraraghavan, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Rice University's George R. Brown School of Engineering, a university in Texas, was selected by the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science, and Technology (TAMEST), to receive this award for emerging researchers in the state because of his ground-breaking imaging technology, which aims to make the invisible visible.
“Dr. Veeraraghavan is one of five Texas-based researchers receiving the TAMEST 2024 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards. Each are chosen for their individual contributions addressing the essential role that science and technology play in society, and whose work meets the highest standards of exemplary professional performance, creativity and resourcefulness,” TAMEST said in a statement.
Having spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Chennai, an eastern Indian city, Veeraraghavan told Press Trust India “I am delighted to receive this award. It is the recognition of the wonderful and innovative research that many students, postdocs and research scientists, in the computational imaging lab at Rice University have done over the last decade.”
Veeraraghavan's work aims to address imaging scenarios in which the participating media's light scattering renders the visualisation target unreachable for existing imaging technologies.
His nominator, American engineer, professor and Endowed Chair in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, Alan Bovik also said “Dr Veeraraghavan is tackling one of the hardest problems in imaging, what many consider to be a ‘holy grail problem’ of optical engineering.”
“Every time we improve our ability to see what is unseen, the number of things we can do increases. The NeuWS technology is going to allow us to see things we cannot even imagine today,” he added.
TAMEST, founded in 2004, is a Texas-based organization comprising over 335 members and 22 institutions including the state’s 8 Nobel Laureates. Its annual Edith and Peter O'Donnell Awards recognize Texas researchers for their outstanding work in science and technology.
In 2022, the O'Donnell Awards expanded to include an additional science award in Medicine, Engineering, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Technology Innovation.
