Meet Preeti Aghalayam, The First Woman Director Of IIT

In a first, a woman has been appointed as the director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Preeti Aghalayam will be the lead in charge of India's first offshore campus in Zanzibar in Tanzania.

Who is Preeti Aghalayam?
Preeti Aghalayam is an IIT Madras alumni. After completing her BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1995, she did her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000.

She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, Cambridge and faculty at IIT Bombay. Aghalayam joined IIT Madras in 2010, where she is currently a Professor in the Chemical Engineering department. She was recently acknowledged as one of the 75 Women in STEM by the Principal Scientific Advisor's office.

"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," PTI quoted IIT Madras director V Kamakoti as saying at a press conference.

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.

"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.

The applications for the first academic session, which will begin in October, are already open for two full-time academic programmes.