Preeti Aghalayam has been appointed as the director-in-charge of the IIT Zanzibar campus.
The first woman to serve as campus director at an IIT is Dr. Preeti Aghalayam. She will serve as IIT Madras Zanzibar's first female Director-in-Charge. At IIT Madras, Dr. Preeti holds a professorial position in the Department of Chemical Engineering.
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in Zanzibar is set to become the famous institution's first offshore campus and will be the first IIT campus to be directed by a woman.
"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 told a press conference.
Preeti Aghalayam expressed that becoming the first-ever woman director of an IIT is 'such a big honour'. "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.
In 1991, Aghalayam graduated from IIT Madras with a BTech in chemical engineering. She went to the University of Rochester in New York to pursue an MS in Chemical Engineering after receiving her BTech degree.
Aghalayam went to the University of Massachusetts for her Ph.D. in 1996 after receiving her MS. She has also held positions as a faculty at IIT Bombay and a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, Cambridge.
Preeti is also a marathon runner and a blogger. She has written numerous articles alongside other professors on topics including estimating the impacts of inlet manifold design on diesel oxidation catalytic converter performance and the effects of urea injection non-uniformities on SCR performance using CFD.
Dr. Aghalaya has also received recognition from the Principal Scientific Advisor's office as one of the 75 Women in STEM.
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