Prashant_Kumta

Prashant Kumta

Professor Kumta obtained his Bachelor of Technology in Metallurgical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1984. He then obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Arizona in 1987 and 1990, respectively. He joined Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in 1990 where he was promoted to Full Professor with tenure in 1999 serving on the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). At CMU, he initiated the very first hard and soft materials synthesis, processing, fabrication, structure and property characterization research programs targeting applications in electronic packaging, electronic materials, electrocatalysis, energy storage and conversion. In 1998, he spearheaded the tissue engineering initiative at CMU that culminated with the creation of the first Bone Tissue Engineering Center (BTEC) in 2003 and, ultimately, the inception of the first Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2004. He joined University of Pittsburgh in 2007 where he is currently the Edward R. Weidlein Endowed Chair Professor in the Swanson School of Engineering and the School of Dental Medicine. His main research interests are in the syntheses, structures, and properties of nanostructured materials for electrochemical, electronic, optical, hard and soft tissue engineering, biomineralization, non-viral gene delivery, drug delivery, biosensors, and embryonic stem cell applications. Professor Kumta is the 1993 recipient of the NSF Research Initiation Award (RIA) and a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS) as well as the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE). He has edited/co-edited 10 books, given more than 167 invited presentations, 535 conference presentations, and is the author and co-author of more than 321 refereed publications. He is credited with generating ~$51.6 M in research funding from federal, state, city, national research laboratories, and industrial sponsors. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Materials Science and Engineering, B, Advanced Functional Solid-State Materials, an international journal by Elsevier, and a position he held from 1999-2017.


Appearances