Preeti Aghalayam to become first woman director of IIT, set to lead IIT Zanzibar

Category : Appointment/Resignation Published on: July 13 2023

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The Zanzibar campus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) which is set to become the first offshore campus of the prestigious institution will also be the first IIT campus to be led by a woman director.
With the first academic session scheduled to begin in October, Preeti Aghalayam has been appointed as the director-in-charge of the IIT Zanzibar campus.
Preeti Aghalayam is an alumnus of IIT Madras where she completed her BTech in Chemical Engineering.
In 1995, Aghalayam obtained her BTech degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras. Subsequently, she pursued her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, completing it in 2000.
Following her doctoral studies, she served as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, Cambridge, and later as a faculty member at IIT Bombay.
Recently, she received recognition as one of the 75 Women in STEM from the Principal Scientific Advisor's office.
India and Tanzania recently inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which facilitated IIT Madras to launch its first international campus in Tanzania's Zanzibar.