Meet Preeti Aghalayam, The First Ever-Woman To Be In Charge Of An IIT

Preeti Aghalayam, an IIT Madras alumni, was appointed as the director-in-charge of the IIT Madras’ Zanzibar campus.

New Delhi: Preeti Aghalayam has become the first ever woman to be appointed as the director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Aghalayam, an IIT Madras alumni, was appointed as the director-in-charge of the IIT Madras’ Zanzibar campus.

“Aghalayam is the first woman to be an IIT director. We will see many more encouraging things. We are following sustainable development goals and one of the important goals suggests that we need to bring in gender balance,” IIT Madras director V Kamakoti said. The first academic session of the Zanzibar campus is set to begin in October.

Preeti Aghalayam said it was a “big honour” to be given the responsibility. “I am an alumnus of IIT Madras and doing something of this magnitude for the institute and for the country is such a big honour. Every time we visited Zanzibar as part of the IIT Madras contingent, we noticed that the representation of women on their side is quite significant. So, it was important that we do this mindfully,” Aghalayam said.

Who Is Preeti Aghalayam

• Preeti Aghalayam completed her BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1995.
• Aghalayam completed PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in New England in 2000.
• Preeti Aghalayam has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, Cambridge and faculty at IIT Bombay.
• Preeti Aghalayam joined IIT Madras in 2010, where she is currently a Professor in the Chemical Engineering department.
• Aghalayam was recently acknowledged as one of the 75 Women in STEM by the Principal Scientific Advisor’s office.

About IIT Madras’ Zanzibar Campus

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has become the first IIT in the country to launch an international campus, which is coming up in Tanzania’s Zanzibar. An MoU was recently signed between India and Tanzania, the final procedural step that paves the way for this campus.

Applications for the first academic session are already open with the institute offering two full-time academic programmes.

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