Ishwar Puri named N. Waldo Harrison Professor
Ishwar Puri, professor and head of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics in the College Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named the N. Waldo Harrison Professor by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The N. Waldo Harrison Professorship was established in 1987 by College of Engineering alumnus Nathaniel Waldo Harrison. Harrison served as a member of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in Frankfurt, Germany, during World War II, and later created the professorship to acknowledge the extraordinary education he received at Virginia Tech. The professorship is for a five-year period.
Since 2004, Puri has served as professor and head of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. As a researcher, Puri has published more than 300 papers in archival and conference publications, and book chapters in the topics related to nanoscience and nanotechnology, transport phenomena, fluid mechanics, combustion, mathematical biology, and higher education.
He is editor of the Journal of Experimental Heat Transfer and associate editor of the International Journal of Combustion.
Puri also leads National Science Foundation-funded teams in nanotechnology undergraduate education and graduate ethics education programs, coordinates the Virginia Tech Emerging Issues in Technology seminar series, and directs the U.S. Department of Education EVALUATE-E project, which evaluates inter-university collaborative graduate degree programs in engineering.
He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Through his mentoring, he has advised the research of 15 doctoral degree students, 27 master's degree students, and nearly 50 undergraduate students.
He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Delhi in India and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.
