Subra Suresh is an Indian-born American engineer, materials scientist, and academic leader. He is currently a Professor at Large at Brown University and a Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also serves as a board member at the Villars Institute. From 2007 to 2010, he was the Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT. In 2010, he was appointed as Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) by President Barack Obama and held this position until 2013. He later became the president of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) from 2013 to 2017. From 2018 to 2022, he was the fourth president of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where he also held the title of inaugural Distinguished University Professor.
In February 2024, Société Générale, a major European financial services company, announced that Subra Suresh has been named Chairman of the Group’s Scientific Advisory Council.
Suresh was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2002, to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and to the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 2013. He is one of the few Americans to be elected to all three branches of the U.S. National Academies. He is also the first and only university president to hold this distinction. He was the first Asian-born professor to lead any of the five schools at MIT and the first Asian-born scientist to lead the NSF.
In October 2023, President Biden awarded Suresh the National Medal of Science, which is the highest honor given to a U.S. scientist. The ceremony took place at the White House.
Early life and education
Suresh was born in Mumbai, India, and completed high school in Tamil Nadu when he was 15 years old. In May 1977, he earned his BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai, graduating with a First Class with Distinction. In 1979, he received a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University. Later, in 2022, Iowa State University awarded him an honorary doctor of science degree. In 1981, he earned a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From 1981 to 1983, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Career
Suresh joined Brown University in December 1983 as an Assistant Professor of Engineering. He was given a higher position as Associate Professor with a permanent job in July 1986 and became a full Professor in July 1989. In 1985, he was chosen by the White House to receive the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He also won the 1982 Hardy Medal for showing great promise in the field of metallurgy before the age of 30. In 1992, he received the Ross Coffin Purdy Award from the American Ceramic Society for writing the best paper published in their journal in 1990. In 1991, his book Fatigue of Materials was published by Cambridge University Press. According to Google Scholar, the book has been cited more than 7,800 times in other scientific works and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese. It is used as both a textbook and a reference book.
Suresh returned to Brown University in September 2023 as Professor at Large to give public lectures and continue his research work.
In 1993, Suresh moved to MIT as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. He led MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering from 2000 to 2006. From 2007 to 2010, he was the Dean of Engineering at MIT, the first person born in Asia to hold this position. He taught at MIT in several departments, including Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering, and Health Sciences and Technology.
During his time at MIT, Suresh helped create new laboratories, an undergraduate program in materials science and engineering, the MIT Transportation Initiative, and the Center for Computational Engineering. He also helped start the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Center and worked to bring more women into engineering positions at MIT. As Dean of Engineering, he started or managed major international programs in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.
In June 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Suresh to be the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The U.S. Senate confirmed him in September 2010. The NSF is a government agency with a $7-billion budget in 2013. Its 2013 Fact Sheet said the NSF helps keep the United States at the top in science and engineering, supports future scientists and engineers, and helps the economy grow. In 2012, the NSF supported more than 300,000 people at 1,895 institutions across the United States.
Suresh led the NSF from 2010 to 2013. He started several new programs, including INSPIRE, PEER, SAVI, the NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative, GROW, and the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps).
During his time at the NSF, Suresh was part of the National Science and Technology Council, a group of top government officials. He helped lead the Council's science and STEM education committees and was part of the National Ocean Council. He also led the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee, which created a five-year plan to guide Arctic research.
The I-Corps program, which Suresh created in 2012, helps turn scientific discoveries into products. It has been copied by other organizations, including the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. According to an NSF report from 2023, I-Corps helped start about 1,700 companies that raised more than $4 billion in funding since 2012.
In 2012, Suresh started and led a Global Summit on Scientific Merit Review at the NSF. This event brought together leaders from science funding agencies in nearly 50 countries. The summit created a statement about scientific standards and started the Global Research Council (GRC), which now meets every year to help scientists around the world work together.
In an article in Science magazine, Suresh said, "Good science anywhere is good for science everywhere."
When Suresh left the NSF in 2013, President Obama said, "We have been very fortunate to have Subra Suresh guiding the National Science Foundation for the last two years. He has shown himself to be a consummate scientist and engineer – beholden to evidence and committed to upholding the highest scientific standards. He has also done his part to make sure the American people benefit from advances in technology, and opened up more opportunities for women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups. I am grateful for his service."
In 2013, Suresh became the 9th president of Carnegie Mellon University and served until 2017. During this time, he taught at several departments at CMU.
As president, Suresh worked to increase the number of women in science, technology, and math fields. He said, “If the United States is to remain a leader in discovery and innovation, we must use the great talent of young women.”
During his time at CMU, the university solved a big legal case involving patents against Marvell Technology Group. The money from the case, expected to be about $250 million, was used to improve student experiences. Suresh also helped get donations from people and companies, including $67 million from CMU alum David Tepper, $35 million from Tata Consultancy Services, and $5.5 million from Uber.
In early 2017, Suresh supported CMU students after President Trump’s immigration ban. In a letter to students, he said he was “deeply troubled by some of the news out of Washington in recent days, and potential threats – explicit and implicit – posed to the work of so many students and scholars across the nation who were not born in the United States.” He shared his own story as an immigrant, writing, “I first came to the US at age 21 with a partially filled suitcase, less than $100 in cash, and a one-way airplane ticket purchased with a loan. Once in the US, I was able to pursue a series of extraordinary opportunities for scholarship and service.”
Honors
In 2007, he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
In 2013, Suresh was elected to the Institute of Medicine. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
In 2011, Suresh received the Padma Shri award, India's fourth-highest civilian honor, given by the President of India. Other honors include the 2006 Acta Materialia Gold Medal; the 2007 European Materials Medal, the highest honor from the Federation of European Materials Societies; the 2008 A. Cemal Eringen Medal from the Society of Engineering Science; the 2011 General President's Gold Medal from the Indian National Science Congress; the 2012 R.F. Mehl Award from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society; the 2011 Nadai Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME); and the 2011 National Materials Advancement Award from the Federation of Materials Societies. In 2011, Science Watch/Thomson Reuters selected Suresh as one of the top 100 materials scientists worldwide for the decade 2000–2010. He also received ASME's 2012 Timoshenko Medal, the highest recognition in the field of theoretical and applied mechanics, and the 2013 Alan Cottrell Gold Medal for his pioneering work on fracture and fatigue of materials. He received the Franklin Institute's 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science for "outstanding contributions to our understanding of the mechanical behavior of materials in applications ranging from large structures down to the atomic level" and for showing "how deformation of biological cells can be linked to human disease." In 2015, Suresh was awarded the IRI Medal by the Industrial Research Institute. Suresh received the ASME Medal in 2020.
Suresh is a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain; the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences; the German Academy of Sciences; the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences; the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World; the Indian National Academy of Engineering; the Indian Academy of Sciences; the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and the French Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of 20 honorary doctorate degrees from universities in the United States, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, India, China, and the United Kingdom.
Suresh has been honored with named initiatives in several academic institutions. In 2020, Iowa State University established the Subra Suresh Faculty Fellows program. In 2022, the California Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras established the Subra Suresh Distinguished Lecture Series. In 2023, Brown University launched the Subra Suresh Colloquium Series at the Frontiers of Technology and Society.
He served as an independent director of Battelle Memorial Institute from 2014 to 2017, and of the Lord Corporation in 2010. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard and as an independent Director of the Board of Singapore Exchange (SGX).
In both 2018 and 2021, Suresh was named a laureate of the Asian Scientist 100 by the Asian Scientist.