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Preeti Aghalayamโs story with IIT Madras began when she was a student trying to build a future in engineering. She enrolled in the instituteโs chemical engineering programme in 1991, graduating in 1995.
At the time, she could not have known that her association with IIT Madras would stretch across decades: first as a student, later as a professor, and eventually as a director, helping the institute establish its presence beyond India.
Aghalayam grew up in a family where education and science were part of everyday life. Her father was a chemistry professor, and conversations about scientific ideas at home helped shape her curiosity.
Her mother, too, influenced her understanding of hard work: while Aghalayam was in high school, she watched her mother make time for her own PhD alongside other responsibilities.
Her familyโs academic background gave her an early view of university life. Aghalayam went on to study chemical engineering at IIT Madras before moving to the United States for further education.
She completed a masterโs degree in chemical engineering at the University of Rochester in 1995 and earned her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000. Her academic career also took her to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before she returned to India.
Aghalayam joined IIT Bombay as a faculty member before moving to IIT Madras in 2010, where she spent 25 years teaching and conducting research in chemical engineering.
Her research interests include underground coal gasification, reducing automotive nitrogen oxide emissions, reactor modelling and the reduction of large reaction mechanisms.
Alongside teaching, she has received recognition from scientific and engineering bodies, including the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers.
For someone who had once sat in IIT Madras classrooms as a student, returning as a professor meant seeing the institution from another side, guiding students through the same broad world of engineering and research that had shaped her own career.
In July 2023, Aghalayam was appointed director-in-charge of IIT Madras Zanzibar, the instituteโs first international campus in Tanzania. The appointment made her the first woman to lead an IIT.
The role was different from her work in a familiar campus setting. She was helping establish an institution outside India, with students from different countries and programmes designed for an international academic environment. Its first batch included students from Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, India and Nepal.
The Zanzibar campus began classes in October 2023, initially offering programmes in areas including Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. For Aghalayam, the task brought together her experience as an engineer, researcher and educator with the responsibility of helping a new campus take shape.
Aghalayam is now Dean of the Office of Global Engagement at IIT Madras and remains associated with IIT Madras Zanzibar as a former director-in-charge and faculty member.
Her journey has taken her from an engineering student in Chennai to higher studies and academic work in the United States, back to teaching in India, and then to leading an IIT campus in Tanzania.
The institute where she began her education became the place where she helped make a new chapter possible โ this time, as its first woman IIT leader.
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