Prof. Satya Chakravarthy: Brief Biographical Sketch
Satya Chakravarthy is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian
Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India.
He received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Aerospace Engineering in
1991 from IIT Madras, and went to obtain his Master of Science in Aerospace
Engineering degree in 1992 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1995, both from the
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
After a brief post-doctoral stint at Georgia Tech, he joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering at
IIT Madras in 1997, where he was appointed Assistant Professor in 1998, and Associate Professor in 2003.
He is serving as Professor there since 2009. In between, he has visited Georgia Tech in 2000-2001, and
Technische Universitat Darmstadt in 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2009.
Satya Chakravarthy works in the areas of propulsion and combustion, and researches on different aspects
of combustion in gas turbine and rocket engines. He heads the National Centre for Combustion Research
& Development (NCCRD) at IIT Madras supported by the Department of Science and Technology,
Government of India, with a fund of Rs. 47 crore, which is augmented by research funding over Rs.54
crores with 33 industry projects on different aspects of combustion in automotive, aerospace, thermal
power, and fire research. The NCCRD is the largest of its kind in the world, with a 5-storey building that
houses the state-of-the-art facilities on combustion research, including a 33 metre-tall microgravity drop
tower. Recently, Satya Chakravarthy is also heading the Centre of Propulsion Technology supported by
DRDO with funding of Rs. 84 crores.
He has over 85 peer-reviewed archival journal publications to his credit, and presented over 200
conference papers, delivered many keynote/plenary/invited lectures, visited many universities such as
MIT, Cambridge, TU Berlin, TU Munich, etc., and industries such as GE, FM Global, etc. He is on the
editorial board of Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, and is a Colloquium Co-Chair on Solid
Fuel Combustion for the International Symposium on Combustion, Dublin, 2018.
He has been awarded the HAL Prize for the best undergraduate in aerospace engineering in 1991, the
Young Engineer Award by the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2003, the Young Faculty
Recognition Award by IIT Madras in 2009, the Dalmi-HEMSI-ACRHEM Award by the High Energy
Materials Society of India in 2009, and the DRDO Academic Excellence Award by the Defence Research
and Development Organization twice, in 2009 and 2016.
Satya Chakravarthy is the Director of The ePlane Company, a startup company aiming to make a new
breed of aircraft called hybrid aerial vehicles for vertical takeoff and landing as well as long distance flight
to carry goods and passengers, ultimately leading to air taxi operations; Director of Aerostrovilos, a
startup company aiming to produce micro gas turbines for decentralized power generation; share-holding
Advisor to Agnikul Cosmos, a startup company aiming to make mini launch vehicles to launch micro- and
nano-satellites into space orbits; Director of X2Fuels & Energy, a startup company aiming to convert any
kind of wastes -municipal solid wastes and agri wastes- into crude oil. He is also involved in efforts to
set up a centre for precision agriculture technology at IIT Madras, and to form consortium of industries
and R&D institutions for making aircraft engines through 3D printing in India with governmental support.
He has delivered invited talks titled "Ubiquitous Flying" at the Mahindra Technical Academy on their
Great Ideas for Tomorrow (GIFT) programme and at Amadeus on their aGeek programme. His web
presence includes TedX talks, one on "India" s Space Programme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lGiLzsNS24
and more recently, another on a topic titled
"Defrastructure" http://progressvideo.tv/videos/democratizing-technology-through-defrastructure-dr-satyanarayanan-chakravarthy-tedxnittrichy
besides his 55 lectures on a graduate level course on
Combustion on YouTube through the National Programme on Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL)
and the first-of-its-kind-in-the-world semester long course on Electric Aircraft Propulsion, video-recorded
through November 2019 (to be uploaded).
