Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, July 10: The first offshore campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, the Zanzibar campus of IIT Madras, is now led by a woman.
IIT Madras alumni Preeti Aghalayam has been named the director- in -charge of the Zanzibar campus, where the first academic session is scheduled to start in October.
“Aghalayam is the first woman to be an IIT director. We will see many more encouraging things. We are following sustainable development goals and one of the important goals suggests that we need to bring in gender balance,” IIT Madras director V Kamakoti said at a press conference.
First IIT in the nation to do so, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras will soon open an overseas campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The last legal step needed to establish this campus was recently completed with the signing of an MoU between Tanzania and India.
The institute is already accepting applications for the first semester and is providing two full-time academic programmes.
“I am an alumnus of IIT Madras and doing something of this magnitude for the institute and for the country is such a big honour. Every time we visited Zanzibar as part of the IIT Madras contingent, we noticed that the representation of women on their side is quite significant. So, it was important that we do this mindfully,” Aghalayam said.
IIT Madras granted Aghalayam her BTech in Chemical Engineering in 1995 and the University of Massachusetts Amherst granted her PhD in 2000. She has held positions as faculty at IIT Bombay and postdoctoral researcher at MIT, Cambridge.
Aghalayam joined IIT Madras in 2010, and as of right now, she serves as a Professor in the department of Chemical Engineering. She was most recently named by the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor as one of the 75 Women in STEM.
