Oct. 31, 2014
ASME honors Ranjan Mukherjee with the 2014 Charles Stark Draper Innovative Practice Award
The American Society for Mechanical Engineering (ASME) only presents the Charles Stark Draper Innovative Practice Award once every two years – and the distinctive honor has come to the Michigan State University College of Engineering.
Ranjan Mukherjee was honored Oct. 23 during the 47th Annual ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division Awards Ceremony in San Antonio.
The Charles Stark Draper Innovative Practice Award is presented every two years by ASME’s Dynamic Systems and Control Division to a member for either excellent sustained contributions or for an outstanding major, singular contribution in innovative applications of dynamic systems, measurement, or control in engineering practice.
Mukherjee was honored for his “fundamental contributions to the modeling and control of underactuated systems with applications to robotics.”
Mukherjee is a professor of mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering, and the associate chair of the graduate program in MSU’s College of Engineering.
Mukherjee’s research interests are in the broad area of mechatronics and robotics. He is an ASME fellow and has served on the executive committee of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division.
He joined MSU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering in 1996 and began a joint appointment with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2010.
In 2009, he conducted Fulbright Scholar Research in the Department of Mechano-Informatics at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Among his other honors, he received the Withrow Distinguished Scholar Senior Award from the College of Engineering in 2011.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1987, and master’s and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1989 and 1991.
Prior to joining MSU, he was an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., from 1991 to 1996.
