Scientific American cites work of 2 Indians

New York, Dec 2: Two Indians and a Sri Lankan have been named in the list of 50 achievers in the field of science and technology by a noted monthly magazine in the United States.

Indian-Americans Pulickel Ajayan and Prabhakar R Bandaru and Sri Lanka-born H Kumar Wickramasinghe have been honoured by the Scientific American, said to be the oldest published magazine in the U S.

The magazine published the 50-member list of achievers in its December issue with their photos and the areas of their work.

Ajayan is an assistant professor at the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the famous Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, upstate New York.

He was recognized for his research on carbon nanotubes by the Materials Research Society, which will present a medal to him at a ceremony in Boston.

He was also cited for his work by the Scientific American. The monthly said on the list of those honoured, ''We recognize research, business and policy leaders who have played a critical role in driving key science and technology trends over the past year in areas that include robotics, genetics, Alzheimer's and nanotechnology.'' The magazine named Ajayan a research leader in the Materials Progress category for his work, which involved creating super-resilient springs from thin carbon tubes that could one day be used to create artificial joints.

Ajayan received B Tech in Metallurgical Engineering from Benaras Hindu University and his doctorate in Materials Science and Engineering in 1989 from Northwestern University in Illinois. He did his research work in Japan, France and Germany, and has been assistant professor since January 1997.

Bandaru, who won the magazine's honour in the Chicken Wire category, is a professor in the Jacobs School of Engineering's Materials Science Program at the University of California, San Diego.

He and his colleagues at the university demonstrated a radical nanotube-based transistor. The magazine described graphitic structures, the area of Bandaru's research, as Chicken Wire.

He received his doctorate from the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998 with a master's thesis in the thermodynamic phase transformation issues in magneto-optic media.

After a year as process research engineer in ferroelectric materials at Applied Materials Inc., Santa Clara, California, Bandaru joined the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a post doctoral research engineer.

Wickramasinghe is a native of Colombo. He was educated at the University of London. In 1984, he joined IBM at the T J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

The magazine recognized his new gene sequencing technique. He and his colleagues reported in May the technique that sorts DNA fragments roughly 100,000 times faster than conventional techniques.

UNI