Professor Mayuresh V. Kothare, Department Chairman and the R. L. McCann Professor has won the 2020 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. Professor Kothare was one among seven alumni who were recognized in 2020. IIT Bombay confers the Distinguished Alumnus Awards (DAA) every year to those who have reached positions of eminence in the areas of Business, Academics, Research, Government, Public Service and Entrepreneurship. These individuals would have "distinguished themselves in their fields of work and done the Institute proud".
Dr. Kothare received his B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1991 where he was Institute Silver Medalist. Dr. Kothare then received his MS (1995) and PhD (1997) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), both in Chemical Engineering, with a specialization in Control and Dynamical Systems. At Caltech, Dr. Kothare studied under the guidance of Prof. Manfred Morari, a world-renowned figure in the field of Dynamics and Control Systems. Following his PhD, Dr. Kothare held a postdoctoral scientist position at Mobil Oil Corporation in Paulsboro, NJ for one year. At Mobil, Dr. Kothare studied the use of detailed reaction kinetics models in the large-scale economic optimization of entire petrochemical plants in a platform called Real Time Optimization (RTO), involving the simultaneous solution of nearly a million equations with a million unknown variables, amongst the largest such numerical optimization problems to be solved in the industry at that time. Following this postdoctoral experience, he started his academic career as an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Lehigh University in 1998. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure, in 2003, to the rank of Professor in 2008 and was appointed Chairman of Lehigh University’s Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department in 2012.