May 12, 2023
IIT Kharagpur Students Receive Scholarships from the Guru Krupa Foundation (GKF) for Overseas Research Internships in Summer 2023
IITKGP Foundation
In collaboration with the IITKGPF (USA), the Guru Krupa Foundation (GKF) scholarship was awarded to 10 IITKGP students. This is the 2nd year that the GKF Scholarship will be used by IITKGP students to carry out their research internship in foreign universities. 10 students were selected by a IITKGP selection committee for a total scholarship award of $45,000. Each scholarship ranged from $1,000 to $5,000 depending upon the funding received by the student from their host institutions. The GKF scholars are doing their summer research internship at premier universities in the USA, UK, Belgium, Canada, and Germany.
The funds are donated by IITKGP alum Mukund Padmanabhan and his Guru Krupa Foundation (GKF) - www.guru-krupa.org. Mukund stated that “... these summer programs definitely add value to an IITKGP education and it is my pleasure, as an alumnus, to be able to provide these internships to current students, that will further contribute to their overall development.”
Mukund Padmanabhan received a BS in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 1997, and a MS (1989) and PhD (1992) in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. After UCLA, he worked in the area of speech recognition at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Lab where he managed the Advanced Telephony Speech Algorithms group. After IBM, he pivoted to Wall Street and is currently a partner and researcher at hedge fund Renaissance Technologies in New York. He is the founder and president of the US-based private charitable foundation, the Guru Krupa Foundation, that supported the scholarships for research internships for IITKGP students. Dr Padmanabhan is the recipient of the Professional Achievement Award from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering (2019) and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IITKGP (2021).