Dr S Chandrasekhar, the astrophysicist, was perhaps the fi rst Tamil from South India, to make a mark in the world of science in the west. A nephew of Sir CV Raman, he did pathbreaking science in the UK and USA, and Stars from Tamil Nadu on the World Stage emulated his uncle by winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983. Over the decades, a number of Indians, including south Indians, have competed on the world stage and earned accolades in science, business, art and even politics. Matrix has pleasure in saluting fi ve super-achievers with their origins in Tamil Nadu, who have been in the news in recent years.
KR Sridhar’s Invention will Revolutionise Electricity Distribution
KR Sridhar, PhD (born 1960), PrincipalCo-founder and Chief Executive Offi cer of Silicon Valley’s Bloom Energy, hit world headlines when he unveiled the Bloom Box, a fuel-cell system that produces energy that’s cleaner and more effi cient than oil, gas or coal and more reliable than wind or solar power. On 24 February 2010, Bloom Energy launched its new energy-effi cient and environmentally friendly fuel cell. e-Bay and Google should know. They have been among the fi rst to try out the sensational Bloom Energy distributed power supply system, which promises to change the face of villages, workplaces and homes.
An effi cient, affordable fuel cell, the Bloom Energy solution is a novel distributed- energy power producer, enabling businesses, residents and villages to produce their own power on site instead of relying on relatively ineffi cient centralised power. B efore founding B loom Energy, Dr KR Sridhar was D irector of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at the University of Arizona where he was also a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. Sridhar has served as an advisor to NASA and has led major consortia of industry, academia, and national labs. His work for the NASA Mars program to convert Martian atmospheric gases to oxygen for propulsion and life support was recognised by Fortune magazine, where he was cited as “one of the top five futurists inventing tomorrow, today.”
Indra Nooyi is the Most Powerful Woman in Business
Fortune magazine has named her number one on its annual ranking of Most Powerful Women in business for every year since 2006. The Global Supply Chain Leaders Group named her 2009 CEO of the Year. In 2008, she was named one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report, elected to the Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and elected Chair of the US-India Business Council (USIBC), representing more than 300 of the world’s largest companies doing business in India. Forbes magazine ranked her third on the 2008 and 2009 lists of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.
In 2007, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan. Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, born on 28 October 1955 is the Chairperson and Chief Executive Offi cer of PepsiCo, one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies. She holds a BSc from Madras Christian College, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata and a Master of Public and Private Management from Yale University. In India, she had worked at Johnson & Johnson and Mettur Beardsell. After Yale, Nooyi worked at the Boston Consulting Group in 1980. In 1990 she joined Asea Brown Boveri as its head of strategy. Moving to PepsiCo in 1994, she became its chief strategist.
Climbing the ladder of success rapidly, Nooyi was named President and CEO on October 1, 2006 and assumed the role of Chairman on May 2, 2007. A rock guitarist from her youth, Nooyi still sings at company functions. She is a regular visitor at the concerts during the annual Carnatic music season at Chennai. Fortune magazine has named her number one on its annual ranking of Most Powerful Women in business for every year since 2006.
The Global Supply Chain Leaders Group named her 2009 CEO of the Year. In 2008, she was named one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report, elected to the Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and elected Chair of the US-India Business Council (USIBC), representing more than 300 of the world’s largest companies doing business in India. Forbes magazine ranked her third on the 2008 and 2009 lists of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.
In 2007, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan. Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, born on 28 October 1955 is the Chairperson and Chief Executive Offi cer of PepsiCo, one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies. She holds a BSc from Madras Christian College, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata and a Master of Public and Private Management from Yale University. In India, she had worked at Johnson & Johnson and Mettur Beardsell. After Yale, Nooyi worked at the Boston Consulting Group in 1980. In 1990 she joined Asea Brown Boveri as its head of strategy. Moving to PepsiCo in 1994, she became its chief strategist. Climbing the ladder of success rapidly, Nooyi was named President and CEO on October 1, 2006 and assumed the role of Chairman on May 2, 2007. A rock guitarist from her youth, Nooyi still sings at company functions. She is a regular visitor at the concerts during the annual Carnatic music season at Chennai.
Ramakrishnan’s Work will Help Save Lives
57 - year - old molecular biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year with Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for their work on ribosomes (components of cells that make proteins from amino acids), in the process helping “develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering”. Leaving his birthplace Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu when barely three, Ramakrishnan did his undergraduate studies at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a BSc in Physics in 1971.
At 19, he moved to the USA, where he obtained his PhD in Physics from Ohio University in 1976. He switched to biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and began work on ribosomes at Yale. He continued the work at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and moved to the University of Utah as a Professor of Biochemistry, in 1995. In 1999, he joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
A Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of EMBO and the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Ramakrishnan has e arned several awards and honours including the Padma Vibhushan, in 2010. Ramakrishnan’s wife Vera Rosenberry is a famous author and illustrator of children’s books. His stepdaughter, Tania Kapka is a doctor in Oregon, and s on Raman Ramakrishnan a cellist in New York. Keen on bicycling, hiking and music, Ramakrishnan has been seen at concerts during the Chennai December season.
CK Prahalad Aims to Change the World
CK Prahalad is one of the business world’s most infl uential professors and consultants who invested millions of dollars of his own money to see if he could build a company around the
principles he has been teaching other high-powered leaders, changing the world in the process. The author of several international bestsellers [like “Competing for the Future” (with Gary Hamel), “The Future of Competition,” (with Venkat Ramaswamy), “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits,” and (with MS Krishnan) The New Age of Innovation] took leave of his consultancy at Ann Arbor, Michigan, scaled back his consulting work, put up several million dollars to get his company Praja going, and moved his family to San Diego.
Praja is a high-technology company that allows people to personalise their own experiences on the Internet. Its platform, ExperienceWare, organises data by context, rather than by time or written words, sorting text, video, audio, and sensory data. Prahalad says that Praja will facilitate the most profound i mpact of the Internet: the empowerment of the individual. “Consumers did not have much share of voice,” he says.
“Now they do. There is a fundamental transition that is taking place – from a fi rm-centric society to a consumer-centric society.” One of the recipients of the Pravasi Bharatiya Sammaan awards in 2009, CK Prahalad was conferred the Padma Bhushan the same year. In 2009 he was named the world’s most infl uential business thinker on The Thinkers 50 list, published by The Times.
VS Ramachandran is a Neuroscientist Par Excellence
Often known for the success of his book Phantoms in the Brain, in which he describes his experiments with amputees and phantom limbs, VS Ramachandran is seen as a future Nobel laureate for his original work as a neuroscientist.
VS Ramachandran, MD, PhD, is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. Hailing from a prominent Mylapore (Chennai) family, Ramachandran is the grandson of legal luminary Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer. He studied Medicine in Chennai, obtaining an MD from Stanley Medical College. He later did his PhD from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
Ramachandran is a trustee for the San Diego museum of art and has lectured widely on art, visual perception and the brain. He has published over 120 papers in scientifi c journals (including three invited review articles in the Scientifi c American), is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Human Behaviour, co-author (with Sandra Blakeslee) of Phantoms in the Brain which has been translated into eight languages and formed the basis for a two part series on Channel Four TV UK and a PBS special in USA.
Newsweek magazine recently named him a member of “The Century Club”, one of the “hundred most prominent people to watch in the next century.” Dr Ramachandran is proud of his Indian heritage, especially Carnatic music and Indian bronzes. On his annual visits to Chennai, he is frequently seen at music concerts and mixing freely with people from several walks of life.