Madhavan Swaminathan has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli (NITT), located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for his pioneering work and leadership in electronic packaging at Georgia Tech and IBM over the last 25 years.

The Honorable Pranab Mukherjee, president of India, presented Swaminathan and 30 additional distinguished recipients with this honor on July 19 at the NITT campus, which is currently celebrating its 50-Year Golden Jubilee. Suresh Sitaraman, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, was also recognized with the same award at this event.

Swaminathan received his bachelor of engineering degree in electronics and communications from NITT in 1985 and went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees from Syracuse University in 1989 and 1991, respectively. In addition to his accomplishments at Georgia Tech and IBM, Swaminathan was recognized for helping to shape the design aspects of packaging that have led to the development of system on package technologies around the world, including the creation of an electronic packaging program at NITT and the education of engineers and scientists in India from both the private and public sectors.

Swaminathan is a faculty member at Georgia Tech, where he currently holds the John Pippin Chair in Electromagnetics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is the director of the Interconnect and Packaging Center. He also served as the deputy director of the Microsystems Packaging Research Center, a National Science Foundation-sponsored Engineering Research Center. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked for IBM on the packaging for supercomputers.

As the leader of the Mixed-Signal Design Research Group in ECE, Swaminathan has graduated 35 Ph.D. and 17 M.S. students. He has published more than 400 technical articles, holds 27 patents, and has authored three books, all related to electronic packaging. He also co-founded and founded two spin-off companies, Jacket Micro Devices (JMD), which focused on integrated RF modules and substrates for wireless applications, and E-System Design, which focuses on the development of CAD tools for integrated 3D microsystems.

Swaminathan’s research has been recognized through numerous awards, including 16 best paper and best student paper awards, a Technical Excellence Award from Semiconductor Research Corporation in 2007, the IBM Outstanding Faculty Award in 2004 and 2005, the Georgia Tech ECE Outstanding Graduate Research Advisor Award in 2002, and the 2014 IEEE Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology Society Outstanding Sustained Technical Excellence Award. A Fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Swaminathan has also served as the Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society.

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In the group photo, Swaminathan is pictured in the top row, second from the left, while Sitaraman is in the middle row on the left end of the row.