IEOR is happy to announce that IIT Bombay has conferred the honour of Professor Emeritus to Prof. P.G. Awate in the recent Senate Meeting. Prof. Awate was one the founding members of the Department and also one of the first faculty members.
IEOR congratulates him on this momentous occasion and extends its gratitude.
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Professor Prakash Awate recognized the academic importance of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and started postgraduate programs here in IIT Bombay, in 1976 soon after joining the institution. He introduced and taught numerous courses, mostly at PG level, particularly in the initial decades of IEOR program. He participated in teaching IEOR computational labs also.
He stressed the understanding of the basic principles of the subject in his teaching, and during later years embraced computations as an essential element of application. He was engaged in interactions with a variety of industries. He held with distinction various positions like Convenor/Head of the the IEOR programme (multiple times), member of IEOR Postgraduate Committee and other institute committees. He was member of Research Progress Committees of many PhD students, including some from other depts.
Prof Awate was associated with the IEOR programme for 42 years, as a faculty member, Emeritus Fellow and Adjunct Professor. Except for two years when he was a visiting Professor at AIT Bangkok, he has taught in the programme for his entire career at IIT Bombay.
He has guided/co-guided 108 M.Tech projects in the area of IEOR, over the years and guided/co-guided 5 Ph.D. students. He has taught more than 25 distinct courses in IEOR, Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Management (the precursor of the current School of Management) and Mathematics, most of which he has developed the syllabus initially and many of which have been subsequently taken on and developed further by other faculty who joined. This makes him one of the most versatile academicians on the campus, in terms of teaching. In student guidance and research output, he has collaborated with faculty from IEOR, Industrial Management, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and also the Economics faculty in Humanities and Social Sciences.
In the early years, the basic foundation of the discipline was laid largely by Prof Awate, in collaboration with a few other faculty from Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics, who taught parts of the programme from time to time. The continuity and sustained growth of the academic discipline at least till the late 1980s can be attributed largely to Prof Awate’s efforts.
In the early years, Prof Awate built a number of industry connections through his project work, consultations and presentations at forums in India at a time when this was a nascent field. This led to a small, but significant and more importantly, steady impact on the profession in the country, of quantitative and rigorous methods of Operations Research applied to Industrial Engineering problems in industry. He was involved with both the Indian Institute of Industrial Engineering and the Operational Research of India in significant capacities both at the national and chapter levels.
As a forward looking person, he reinvented himself multiple times through his career, starting with Industrial Engineering (he was a silver medallist in IIT Bombay) and mathematics based Operations Research (his thesis won an award in Cornell University), moving to industry applications, then moving to large scale computations and modern industrial databases, and finally moving to knowledge based systems and artificial intelligence based methods. During these transitions, his strong fundamental scientific approach to every subject has inspired many students who studied with him. A large fraction of his students have gone on to do post graduate work and doctoral work and have contributed to the profession significantly.