Professor Amaresh Chakrabarti, Chair and Senior Professor at the Department of Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has been honoured with the prestigious ASME RUTH AND JOEL SPIRA OUTSTANDING DESIGN EDUCATOR AWARD 2025
The ASME Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award was established in 2001 to recognize a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.
Prof. Chakrabarti received the prestigious award for “significant contributions to design education around the world through the development of innovative teaching and research programmes, and for leadership in the global design community”.
Prof. Chakrabarti is a distinguished expert in engineering design and manufacturing, holding degrees from IIEST Shibpur (BE), IISc (ME), and University of Cambridge, UK (PhD). After leading the Design Synthesis group at the EPSRC funded Centre of Excellence called the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge for a decade, he returned to IISc, pioneering design research in India. He founded IDeASLab – India’s first Design Observatory.
His interests span design synthesis, creativity, sustainability, AI, informatics, and Industry 4.0. He has authored 35 books, over 300 peer-reviewed articles, and holds 13 patents. His key contributions include developing measures for design creativity, Idea-Inspire – the first biomimetic inspiration tool, and FuncSION – the first automated configuration synthesis tool. He co-developed Design Research Methodology (DRM) – the most widely used design research methodology in the world, with 3207 citations since 2009 on Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=VvD5STUAAAAJ&hl=en )
He is enlisted as the highest cited researcher from India in the ’Design Practice and Management’ category of the top 2% of researchers in the Stanford University study on the global scientific impact of researchers. He co-initiated India’s first Smart Factory, the ICoRD and I-4AM conference series, CPDMED, India’s first tech incubator for elderly healthcare, and D-CoE, a Centre of Excellence in Design. He also led the initiation of IISc’s MTech in smart manufacturing and a professional PG certification in Industry 4.0. Among his numerous accolades are the Jawaharlal Nehru Predoctoral Fellowship, Cambridge Lundgren Award, UK Vice-Chancellors’ Award, TUM Ambassador Awardee from TU Munich Germany, and Jubilee Professorship, Chalmers University, Sweden, He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineering Designers, the highest honour of the peer society under the UK Royal Charter in engineering design. Professor Chakrabarti was recognized as the “Most Outstanding Researcher” in Decision Sciences during 2015-17 with a 2018 Careers360 Outstanding Faculty Award from the Hon’ Union Minister of HRD, Shri Prakash Javadekar. He received Alumni Award for Excellence in Research in Engineering in 2022 from the Alumni Association of IISc to recognize excellence in research – through research guidance, publications (individual as well as joint), establishing research groups; Contributions to Industry and R&D work resulting in patent for commercialization; and Establishing new schools for research, special research groups in specialized areas, and innovative programmes of research. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal AI EDAM, Cambridge University Press, being its first non-US Editor-in-Chief.
