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Subra Suresh, ScD, Henry L. Hillman President and professor of engineering, of computer science, and of public policy and management, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), will deliver the next presentation in the 2017 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Laureate Lecture Series, a yearlong program featuring top biomedical researchers in their fields. Suresh’s talk, “Study of Human Diseases at the Intersections of Engineering, Sciences, and Medicine,” will be delivered at noon on Wednesday, February 1, in the University of Pittsburgh’s Scaife Hall, Lecture Room 6. [Add to Calendar] This seminar series is open to the public, including all interested University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff. Arthur S. Levine, MD, Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of Medicine, will introduce Suresh and lead the discussion following the lecture.

Suresh, who was recently named the 21st Century Professor of Biomechanics in Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, began his tenure as CMU president in 2013. He is one of only 19 Americans with membership in all three National Academies: the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. His groundbreaking research spans the fields of engineering, biomedicine, and technology. His experimental and modeling work on the mechanical properties of structural and functional materials, innovations in materials design and characterization, and discoveries of possible connections between cellular nanomechanical processes and human disease states have shaped new fields in the fertile intersections of traditional disciplines.

Prior to becoming president of CMU, Suresh was nominated by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the director of the National Science Foundation in September 2010. As director of this $7 billion independent federal agency until 2013, he led the only government science agency charged with advancing all fields of fundamental science and engineering research and related education.

Suresh has coauthored more than 250 journal articles, registered 25 patents, and written three widely used books. More than 100 students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars have been members of his research group, and many of them now occupy prominent positions in academia, industry, and government worldwide. Suresh is an elected fellow or honorary member of materials research societies in the United States and India, and he holds 11 honorary doctorate degrees from institutions in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, China, India, and the United Kingdom.

Suresh received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, his master’s degree from Iowa State University, and his ScD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has held faculty positions at Brown University and at MIT, where he was head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.