Prism Award
Anuradda Ganesh, Ph.D.
Cummins Inc.
For using STEM to advance social development and empowerment of women; for advocating inclusion, equality, and diversity in engineering; and for being a leader who supports a gender-balanced workforce.
Anuradda Ganesh, Ph.D., is a global expert on alternate fuels and renewable energy. As the director and chief technical advisor at Cummins Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. (CTIPL), she advises on innovative technology, regulatory trends, research and development, and policy in collaboration with the Government of India to enable Cummins Inc. and Cummins in India to build a network of strategic projects.
She has contributed extensively to the field of renewable energy. Her research spans a variety of subjects, including alternative fuels, chemicals from biomass and “smart-carbon,” underground coal gasification, and energy systems modeling. She has contributed to the subject with more than 60 international publications and more than 4,000 citations. She has supervised 16 doctoral candidates and has six granted patents. In 2020, Dr. Ganesh was inducted as a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.
In her earlier roles, she established and led the research and innovation for Cummins Technical Center India to address the fit-for-market requirements for Cummins India products. Some of her pioneering work at Cummins involved the development of the lean burn engine, operated using producer gas and husk-based gasification technology.
As a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, Dr. Ganesh brings a combination of excellence in academia and industry. Prior to joining industry, she had an extensive career in academia and research as a professor in the department of energy science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. She was the first woman to head any engineering department at the school. Purdue University invited her to be a visiting faculty in 2008, where she enhanced global collaboration. She joined Cummins after completing her 25-year academic career at IIT Bombay.
Throughout her career, Dr. Ganesh has worked toward women’s equality. She organized the Indo-U.S. workshop “Women Engineers Leading Global Innovation” in 2012. The deliberations, networking, and mentoring at the workshop laid the foundation for establishing the Society of Women Engineers in India.
An engineer at heart, Dr. Ganesh believes in using science and engineering for women empowerment at the grassroots level. She led a project to install electricity in a remote village, wherein she not only provided electricity using the technology developed at the Cummins Engine Research Facility, IIT Bombay, but also trained women to operate and maintain the plant.
Dr. Ganesh is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers India; the Solar Energy Society of India; and the Women’s Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an initiative on renewable energy in India poised to provide a great platform for women entrepreneurs in this field.
She holds a B.E. in chemical engineering from Panjab University and a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and is a certified Six Sigma green belt.
Dr. Ganesh and her husband live in Mumbai and have a daughter who is a competition lawyer in the city. In her spare time, Dr. Ganesh loves to cook dishes from various regions of India and enjoys traveling and meeting people from various cultures. She is a trained Indian classical dancer and also enjoys Pilates.