Ishwar Puri elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded the distinction of Fellow to Ishwar Puri, head of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics in the Virginia Tech College of Engineering.

Puri was elected a fellow by the members of AAAS in recognition of his efforts to advance science and its applications. Before coming to Virginia Tech in 2004, he was executive associate dean of engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago and headed up the university’s microtechnology and nanotechnology initiatives.

During his career as a researcher, Puri has published more than 180 archival and conference publications in the field of combustion and has edited a book on combustion and a textbook on advanced thermodynamics.

Puri is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. During the 1990s, he held positions as an AAAS-EPA Environmental Fellow, a NASA/Stanford University Center for Turbulence Research Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Delhi in India and his master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering science from the University of California at San Diego.

AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and is publisher of the journal Science. Founded in 1848, the non-profit AAAS includes more than 260 affiliated societies and academies of science. With an estimated readership of one million, Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world.

The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The college’s 5,500 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a “hands-on, minds-on” approach to engineering education, complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 1,800 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology.