Plaksha University has announced the appointment of Dr S Shankar Sastry as the Founding Chancellor. He was the Dean of Engineering for over a decade (2007-2018) at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Sastry is currently the Thomas Siebel Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
He holds a BTech from IIT Bombay, MA in Mathematics and MS, and Ph.D in EECS from UC Berkeley. He also holds honorary doctoral degrees from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, the University of Waterloo, Canada, and the Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Sastry has held several prominent positions during his academic career which include being the chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) department at UC Berkeley and the Director of the Information Technology Office at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Arlington. He also served on the faculty of MIT and Harvard.
Inflection point
On his appointment as Chancellor of Plaksha University, Sastry said, “ Higher education is at an inflection point. We need to provide students with a pedagogical experience at the nexus of technology, entrepreneurship, and design. Further, we need to challenge students to confront the messy societal scale grand challenge problems that confront us today. The opportunity to be a part of Plaksha University that has a unique model of being a modern research university with a new pedagogy and outlook, is a privilege and an exciting challenge for me.”
Neeraj Aggarwal, Chairman - Asia Pacific, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Founder, and Chairperson, Board of Trustees, Plaksha University said, “Sastry is a highly respected academic leader and an institution builder globally. We have been very fortunate to have him as the Chair of our Academic Advisory Board for the past five years. We are now delighted to have him join us as our Chancellor.”
His appointment is honorary, in that he will not be compensated for this role, and a formal investiture ceremony of the Founding Chancellor will take place soon.