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Indian Students: Innovation and Quality of Life Are Still a Draw
A $2.8 million, three-year first phase of the joint program has been
sponsored by EBI, the IIT Foundation and Berkeley/LBNL faculty to
host the summer sessions, continued research at IIT-Kharagpur,
joint student/faculty research at both schools, and reciprocal faculty
visits toward completion of final-year projects. IIT Foundation seeded
the first phase of the collaboration, and has agreed to facilitate fund
raising activities so that alums can make “targeted donations” to fund
the UCB IIT KGP collaboration. The second phase will focus on
extended joint research and bringing scientific discoveries to market.
Sharing of intellectual property (IP) patents in this kind of crossborder
exchange has frequently been a challenge. IIT-Kharagpur
benefits from its work studying IP regimes worldwide through its
Rajiv Ghandi School of Intellectual Property.
The IIT Foundation was created in 1992, specifically as an alumni
fundraising association, by Vinod Gupta, an IIT-Kharagpur graduate
and founder of market database developer InfoUSA. The
Foundation has 11 U.S. chapters and 15 others worldwide. Its
global membership numbers 11,700, with 4,300 in the U.S. and
nearly 1,200 in California, of which about 800 are in the Bay Area.
The proximity of the UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) campus to Silicon Valley and the South
Bay Indo-American community has produced a number of significant Bay Area-India
collaborations, among them:
• the Kamil and Talat Hasan Chair in Indian Classical Music, begun in 2000 with an endowment
from the Saratoga couple, respectively a general partner with Hi Tek Venture Partners
and CEO of Sensys Instruments, and their Hasan Family Foundation; the chair is the
first of its kind in the United States;
• the Ali Akbar Khan Endowment for Indian Classical Music, a 1999 Hasan Family Fund
endowment that helped bring Indian star musician Ali Akbar Khan to the UCSC campus
as Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Music;
• the Sarabjit Singh Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies;
• the Kumar Malavalli Chair in Storage Systems, funded through a $1 million 2004
donation made to UCSC’s Basking School of Engineering by Malavalli, the founder of
Brocade Communications;
• the Narinder Singh Kapany Chair in Optoelectronics, launched with a 1999 endowment
from Dr. Kapany, founder of K2 Optronics and Kaptron, former director of UCSC’s
Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED), and a Stanford
visiting scholar;
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