Sujith Raman Pillai Indusekharan Nair (born 11 May 1967), known as R. I. Sujith, is an Indian

aerospace engineer Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is s ...

. He is Institute Professor and the D. Srinivasan Chair Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at

IIT Madras The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras or IIT-M) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. It is one of the eight public Institutes of Eminence of India. As an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), ...

Early life

Sujith was born on 11 May 1967 in

Thiruvananthapuram Thiruvananthapuram ( ), also known as Trivandrum, is the Capital city, capital city of the Indian state of Kerala. As of 2011, the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation had a population of 957,730 over an area of 214.86 sq. km, making it the ...

Kerala Kerala ( , ) is a States and union territories of India, state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile ...

, India. He completed his

Bachelor of Technology A Bachelor of Technology (BTech) is an undergraduate degree that is awarded for a higher education program in engineering. Countries Australia In Australia, the Bachelor of Technology degree is offered by RMIT University, Edith Cowan Univ ...

in aerospace engineering at IIT Madras. He earned his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in aerospace engineering on "Behavior of Droplets in Axial Acoustic Fields" working with

Ben T. Zinn Ben T. Zinn (; born April 21, 1937) is an American academic in engineering and former international soccer player. He is the David S. Lewis Jr., and Regents' Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Biography Ben T. Zinn was born as B ...

at the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, GT, and simply Tech or the Institute) is a public university, public research university and Institute of technology (United States), institute of technology in Atlanta, ...

from 1990 to 1994. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the same department from 1994 to 1995. He then joined IIT Madras as a lecturer in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

Research

Sujith's research has been in the field of thermo-acoustic instability. He demonstrated that low-amplitude aperiodic pressure fluctuations, or combustion noise, are deterministic and chaotic. He modelled the state of intermittency as the intermediate dynamical state as turbulent thermo-acoustic systems transition from the state of combustion noise to the state of thermo-acoustic instability. He suggested that combustion noise exhibits multifractality, which vanishes with the onset of instability. His analogy of the onset of oscillatory instabilities to Bose-Einstein condensation has provided universal scaling laws for various systems. Sujith's introduction of complex networks to thermo-acoustics has shown structural changes in network topology during transitions from combustion noise to instability, aiding in early detection of such transitions. His research has involved a variety of topics relevant in thermo-acoustic systems such as the chimera states, R-tipping, synchronisation theory, amplitude death, partial amplitude death, and phase flip

bifurcation Bifurcation or bifurcated may refer to: Science and technology * Bifurcation theory, the study of sudden changes in dynamical systems ** Bifurcation, of an incompressible flow, modeled by squeeze mapping the fluid flow * River bifurcation, the for ...

Honours and awards

In 2023 he was inducted as International Member of the

United States National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the ...

. He was selected as a fellow of the

Combustion Institute The Combustion Institute is an educational non-profit, international, scientific and engineering society whose purpose is to promote research in combustion science. The institute was established in 1954, and its headquarters are in Pittsburgh, Penn ...

in 2022, and was awarded the Distinguished Fellowship of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration in 2021. He received the J. C. Bose Fellowship in 2019 and the

Swarnajayanti Fellowship The Swarnajayanti Fellowship (SJ) is a research fellowship in India awarded annually by the Department of Science and Technology (India) for notable and outstanding research by young scientists, applied or fundamental, in biology, chemistry, ...

in 2005 from the Department of Science and Technology of the

Government of India The Government of India (ISO 15919, ISO: Bhārata Sarakāra, legally the Union Government or Union of India or the Central Government) is the national authority of the Republic of India, located in South Asia, consisting of States and union t ...

. He is a fellow of the

Indian Academy of Sciences The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore was founded by Indian Physicist and List of Nobel laureates, Nobel Laureate Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, C. V. Raman, and was registered as a society on 27 April 1934. Inaugurated on 31 July 1934, it ...

, an associate fellow of the

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is a professional society for the field of aerospace engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecra ...

, a fellow of the

Indian National Academy of Engineering The Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) was founded in 1987. It consists of India's engineers, engineer-scientists and technologists covering the entire spectrum of engineering disciplines. The academy is registered under the Socie ...

and an honorary fellow of the Indian Society of Systems for Science and Engineering (ISSE). He has been awarded Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the TUM Institute for Advanced Study in 2010. He was awarded fellowship of the

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation () is a foundation that promotes international academic cooperation between scientists and scholars from Germany and abroad. Established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, it is funded by t ...

in 2000. He was the editor-in-chief of the ''International Journal of Spray and Combustion Dynamics'' from 2009 to 2015. He is currently a member of the editorial advisory board of ''Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science''.

References

1967 births Living people {{Improve categories, date=May 2025