Purdue engineer receives Humboldt Research Award

Saurabh Bagchi (Photo/College of Engineering)
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Saurabh Bagchi, a Purdue University professor in electrical and computer engineering, has earned the prestigious Humboldt Bessel Research Award for his work in dependable systems.

The international award is given to 20 researchers from all academic disciplines each year by Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award recognizes researchers who have made significant discoveries that have influenced their fields, and who are expected to continue producing such advances in the future.

“Purdue Engineering is proud that Professor Bagchi has received the prestigious Humboldt Award,” said Mung Chiang, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering. “It highlights both the research excellence and the global partnerships that our faculty achieve.”

Bagchi said the research award recognizes an aggregate of his work on how to build dependable systems that can operate at large scales and harness the power of data analytics.

“Our group has its mission to make systems dependable in design and operation,” he said. “For that we use data analytics techniques but they need to work at large scales - lots of devices and lots of data. We are also committed to release of open data sets to enable the community to build replicable results, such as, our effort for the Fresco data repository.”

Bagchi is founding director of the Purdue College of Engineering’s Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes (CRISP) and a professor in the College of Science’s Department of Computer Science by courtesy.

Bagchi received notification of the honor at the end of March from his nominator and collaborator, Christof Fetzer from the Technical University of Dresden.

Award winners honored for their research are invited to spend up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany. Bagchi will spend that time at Technical University in Dresden.

“We have been collaborating internationally for many years and with this Humboldt award, I can spend time physically in my collaborator's center in Germany and make faster progress,” he said.

The Humboldt Research Award is one of the most prestigious awards in science, and Purdue has had a number of recipients in recent years, including Timothy Zwier, the M.G. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, in 2017, and Natalia Dudareva, distinguished professor of biochemistry and horticulture and landscape, in 2016. 

Writer: Brian L. Huchel, 765-494-2084, bhuchel@purdue.edu 

Source: Saurabh Bagchi, 765-494-3362, sbagchi@purdue.edu