We did it! In just 48 hours you helped raise more than $1M to help Chennai fight COVID. More than 800 of you came forward to make sizable donations - thank you for your generosity!

But we are not stopping. As of 5/8/21, we have raised $1.25M and on track to raise $2M with matching corporate contributions, and between US, India, and Canada. All of our sister organizations - IITMAA, IITM-Foundation and CF-IITM have joined the effort to “Help India Breathe”.

We are hearing from alumni from all over the world about how we could help.

• Rahul Bhojja, IAS (’93 Batch) is leading the Telangana Govt's State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) in Hyderabad and managing the government’s COVID response. He shared the current needs for oxygen in Hyderabad and Telangana, and how we can help. 
• Shalini Puchalapalli (‘95 Batch), and a team of 8 IIT Madras Women alumni are working on relief efforts in Kadapa, and need help to raise $160k. More details here.
• Other alumni from Bangalore, areas of Tamil Nadu, Assam, Delhi too have reached out regarding how we can help their cities and states.

Here is our Progress and our Plans:

• We are finalizing the purchase of 500 Oxygen Concentrators to be distributed in Chennai (~$800k, Rs 5.6 Crores) with estimated delivery on May 15th. We are in constant touch with M.A.Siddique (‘93 Batch), the Principal Secretary and Special coordinator for Covid-19 Management for Chennai. He has shared that the original ask of 2,500 CPAP devices are accounted for with govt funds; and will look for continued deployment of raised funds.
• We are expanding the overall reach of our campaign to assist other cities and states that need help, and where we are uniquely positioned to help. IITMAANA, IITM-Foundation and IITMAA met to decide the best way to help is to: 
  • Source Oxygen devices. Thanks to alumni like Rekha Ranganathan (‘93 Batch), a Sr. Executive in GE with 15+ years of experience in medical equipment, and a few others in the industry, we are uniquely positioned to do this.
  • Leverage our institute’s resources. Our established Trusts and Non-Profits, and the Institute can help purchase and stage devices for delivery.
  • Maximize impact via last-mile delivery in cities and states where we have accountable local leaders like Siddique and Rahul.

So, please continue to share and give through the “India COVID-19 Relief” campaign in the US. If you are based outside the US, please use this campaign site hosted by IITMAA.

We have also identified a few non-profit organizations that can help in more ways:

• We have partnered with TNF (Tamil Nadu Foundation - https://tnfusa.org) to raise additional funds for the ‘Help Tamil Nadu Breathe’ campaign. You can choose this foundation as a way to direct your funds to help Tamil Nadu fight COVID.
• We are partnering with The Wish Foundation to amplify their campaign: “Save Lives - India Needs You Now!”. COVID-19 Measures | WISH Foundation USA to help in places that are not covered by our alumni association.

As IIT Madras alumni, we are in a unique position to help and make an impact during this crisis. Thank you all for stepping up!  Please continue to share the need with your friends, colleagues and anyone who can help: “India COVID-19 Relief”, and stay safe!

-IITMAANA Team

Please send any questions or comments to: [email protected] 

As many are of you are aware India is in the midst of a severe COVID crisis. The situation is rapidly deteriorating especially due to an acute shortage of breathing aids.

One of our own IITM alumni  M.A.Siddique, IAS (BTech ’93), is the Principal Secretary and Special coordinator for Covid-19 Management for Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Siddique is at the forefront of this battle, and he reached out to several of us  in the United States over the weekend, and provided specifics of the current situation in Chennai. 

Chennai currently has 40,000 daily cases and is on the same curve where Bangalore was two weeks ago, implying Chennai would likely hit 200,000 daily cases in two weeks. The situation is dire and the biggest issue is Oxygen. As per the authorities, the impending loss of lives will be due to lack of medical resources, especially breathing aids (CPAP machines, Oxygen concentrators, Ventilators) which can help stabilize people in the initial hours of respiratory distress before they get more involved care or recover. 

We, the alumni of IIT Madras, are blessed to have classmates leading companies such as Philips Healthcare, Medtronic, GE Healthcare that manufacture as well as distribute these devices. A small team of alumni, who are intimately aware of this ecosystem and supply chain, members of IITMAANA, IITM Foundation, and IITM OAR sprung to action over the weekend, and helped secure several hundreds of these high quality devices. We are now actively collaborating with the IIT Madras Office of Alumni Relations (OAR) to help facilitate the distribution of these breathing aids. This is great news - we have the ability to save lives with our actions.

To fund this, we have set up a special fund called "COVID-19 Relief for India" to secure these devices so that they can be immediately delivered and deployed via IIT Madras.

As a registered 501-c-3 non-Profit IITMAANA (EIN: 760035493) we are in a unique position to help in this cause. We are also working on matching commitments from entities in the US and in India so that every dollar donated by IITM alumni could have a possible matching of 2x, thus giving us the opportunity to raise a total of $3 million. Please consider making a donation as time is of essence. 

We couldn't be prouder of our alumni making an impact in the academic and corporate worlds, and now with this, humanitarian impact to a city and a country in crisis. Thank you!

Please Donate Here

Please send us any questions to Prasanna Vinjamuri (pvinj[email protected]), and Ram Vemuri ([email protected]) for any 

FAQ

IITM Alumni helping in the fight against COVID-19

With the recent outbreak of COVID-19, our alumni have contributed generously in many ways to both efforts in the US and in India. We have raised more than $20,000 both at a national and chapter level in relief funds, and helped purchase of critically needed PPE supplies to hospitals in the New York/New Jersey area. There is one more reason for us to proud of our alma-mater.

We have several alumni actively involved in leadership roles in the R&D and Manufacture of critical medical technology for COVID-19. Below are two such profiles - Dr. Madhav Marathe, Rekha Ranganathan and Rajesh Sunderasan.

Bio: Madhav Marathe has extensive experience in modeling and studying infectious diseases. His group has supported almost every outbreak response in the US since 2002, including planning for the H5N1 in 2005, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014 and Zika in 2015. 

Madhav is an endowed Distinguished Professor in Biocomplexity, Director of the Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing (NSSAC) Division, Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative at the University of Virginia, and an alumnus of IIT Madras.

COVID-19 Work:

In a recent interview with The Hindu he describes the challenges of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and discusses India’s potential response. Here are a few excerpts:

What is the challenge in modeling or studying a pandemic, COVID-19 in particular?

Covid-19 presents a number of new challenges in my opinion. In this case, three things happened: (1) The pandemic started in a densely populated region of the world unlike Ebola, which started near Liberia in West Africa; (2) Unlike West Africa, China is much more strongly connected with the world, in terms of economic activity and human mobility; and (3) the incubation period of the disease is longer than many other flu viruses. Moreover, a large number of people – the silent spreaders – don’t show any symptoms at all while being infectious. This makes it hard to track the spread of the disease. Finally, the social and economic impact of this pandemic will go way beyond any disaster we have seen in a long time. Recovering from this impact will require a coordinated global response.

Different countries are responding differently to this virus. So when you are trying to understand it as a scientist, what would you say are the key differences in modeling it?

The way we address how to understand the spread is to build the digital twin of the city. If you want to understand infectious diseases in a large city such as Chennai, then you want to build a realistic social contact network that represents Chennai. In the social network each node is a person and the edge between each person reflects their social connectivity. For example if you and your neighbour come into contact with each other, there will be an edge between you and the neighbour. The problem is the difficulty in constructing these network in the first place. Especially when studying social networks for a large city like Chennai; once the number is more than 15 or 20 nodes, it becomes very hard to synthesise such networks.

We came up with a novel way of constructing a synthetic representation of this network. i.e. a network representation that statistically captures the interactions but need not necessarily be identical to the population. 

You can find the full interview with Dr. Madhav Marathe in The Hindu. You can find his research page here - https://covid19.biocomplexity.virginia.edu/. Some of the above work is in collaboration with Prof. Aravind Srinivasan at U. Maryland (also an IITM alumnus). Dr. Marathe has been invited by the ACM and is also presenting his work to the Governer's office in Virginia. In his words "We are passionate about this work and feel is the best way for me as a scientist to contribute to the society."

Bio: Rekha Ranganathan is the President and CEO, CAE Healthcare at CAE Healthcare. In her role, she is responsible for the overall Global P&l for CAE Healthcare reporting to the Global CEO and the Board. She has deep experience in Emerging Markets - India, China and Brazil, and her specialities include Medical devices, health care and high technology. Rekha is an alumnus of Wharton School, University of California, Berkeley, and an alumnus of IIT Madras.

CAE shifted gears to create a ventilator after the Montreal General Hospital Foundation and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center issued a challenge for an easy-to-use, low-cost ventilator design. A ventilator essentially requires parts to pump air, valves to control pressure, sensors to monitor pressure and electronics so healthcare workers can monitor what’s happening. CAE leveraged both its parts and manufacturing tech to address this challenge. More information is available here.

In addition, CAE Healthcare is helping Healthcare professionals all over the world on training and to seek better solutions on training especially with COVID-19. Link is www.caehealthcare.com

Brief Bio of Dr. Rajesh Sundaresan: After graduating from IITM in ECE, I went to Princeton for a PhD in EE. Subsequently, I worked on 3G modems at Qualcomm from 1999-2005 and then joined IISc in 2005 where I'm currently a professor in the ECE department. I am currently the convenor of the Centre for Networked Intelligence at IISc, and an associate faculty of the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems. At these centres, we mostly work on research related to smart city solutions. https://ece.iisc.ac.in/~rajeshs/

COVID-19 related work: We are working on an agent-based model to simulate epidemic spread in a big city. Of course you will know that we are in a lockdown, initially imposed for 21 days and then extended to 40 days. We want to use our tool to explore and compare various post-lockdown scenarios.  Together with TIFR Mumbai, we wrote a report on unlocking the lockdown in India with a focus on Bengaluru and Mumbai.

Madhav, Rekha and Rajesh's work are outstanding examples of how IITM alumni are helping fight this global pandemic, and we wish them the very best. Are you aware of other IITM Alumni actively involved in helping solve the problems created by COVID-19? Please let us know!

IIT Madras Technology Summit in the Bay Area

Saturday, 8 Sep 2018

ServiceNow, Santa Clara, CA, U.S.A.

IIT Madras is India’s #1 engineering College – for the THIRD year in a row !!!   

San Francisco Bay Area hosts

IIT Madras Technology Summit

Sep 8 at ServiceNow, Santa Clara, CA

Theme: Frontiers in AI

Super Early Bird Registrations expiring soon

REGISTER  NOW

IITMAANA Bay Area Bridge Tournament

30 June 2018 – San Jose Bridge Center, San Jose, CA, U.S.A.

The IITMAANA Bay Area Chapter hosted its 2018 Bridge Tournament at the San Jose Bridge Center in San Jose, CA. This inaugural event attracted several Bridge enthusiasts, who were subjected to bouts of nostalgia from their Bridge-playing days on campus. Many of them had not played Bridge in a long time, and did not have a partner. But, the organizers ensured that everyone who showed up was matched with a partner, and had an entertaining afternoon of Bridge. Lunch and snacks were available in abundance, but the spirit and camaraderie on display showed the IITM bond was strong across the decades. There was representation from every decade starting with the 1970’s, with the youngest player from the 2015 batch. But, the real piece de resistance was seeing the 80+ year-old mother of an Alum matching her wits against the rest of the players.

Here are some PHOTOS taken at the event.

This event was organized by the IITMAANA Bay Area Chapter Committee – Shoba Sivasankar, Mohan Kompella, Niran Kundapur, and Naren Nayak. Special thanks are due to Dinesh Nettar, who put in a tremendous effort to plan and organize the tournament, while also acting as the tournament Director.

The spirit of IITM is flying high!

Prepared By: Naren Nayak, President, IITMAANA, Bay Area Chapter

31 March 2018 – Google, Mountain View, CA, U.S.A.

The IITMAANA Bay Area Chapter hosted its 2018 Gajendra Circle Conference & Networking Event at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA. This annual, day-long event was attended by around 100 people, including spouses and children, from the IITM Alumni community. The conference had a variety of panels catering to the diverse interests of the Alumni community. New, this year, was the Pitch Perfect segment featuring IITM Alums “pitching” their companies, ideas, and products to the audience. This segment gave the attendees an opportunity to learn about businesses, small and large, in different industries.

A key facet of this event was to allow attendees to network. And, there were plenty of opportunities to do this – in between panels, during lunch, and at the Social Hour (it actually was much longer!) at the end of the day. The TARAMS hangout serving tea, coffee, snacks, and beverages helped set the mood and revive nostalgic memories from life at the IITM campus. Sale of IITM memorabilia was brisk. Overall, it was good to see old friends catching up, and many new friendships being formed.

Here are some PHOTOS taken at the event. And, these are the videos:

Pitch Perfect Segment

Gnani Palanikumar, CEO Quest (Pitch Perfect segment)

Nikhil Raj, Paysa.com (Pitch Perfect segment)

Ravi Polisetty, Vlocity Inc. (Pitch Perfect segment)

Panels

Blockchain Unleashed!

Caring for Family Separated by the Seven Seas

Innovation to Product - What's a Successful Go-to-Market Strategy?

AI, AI Everywhere - What Can an IITian Do?

The IITMAANA Bay Area Chapter thanks Google for being the Event Sponsor and providing us its facility. We are grateful to all the panelists and speakers for their time and effort. Our sincere thanks to the volunteers who helped run the event. Our gratitude to the Organizing Committee – Anish Kadavil, Mohan Kompella, Pradeep Madhavarapu, Shishir Rai, Shoba Sivasankar, and Vaibhav Sharma for their tireless efforts. Finally, we appreciate the support of all the attendees for helping make this event a grand success. We look forward to seeing many more from the IITM Alumni community at future IITMAANA events.

It’s good to see the spirit of IITM is flying high!

Prepared By: Naren Nayak, President, IITMAANA, Bay Area Chapter

At the close of nominations, the following nominations were received for the IITMAANA Board posts:

President: Prasanna Vinjamuri, ’93 ME

Vice President: Srinath  Chigullapalli, ’99 Met

Secretary: Amarendra Nettem, ’89 Civil

Treasurer: Ram Vemuri, ’95 CS&E

 As there were just 1 nominations per post, the Board has decided to forego the voting process. On behalf of IITMAANA, we welcome the new board members and we look forward to their leadership in the future.

Mukesh Sundaram

Election officer, IITMAANA

This is a special and exciting time for IITM’ and Alumni to come together with shared values and a common sense of purpose for significant contributions towards education, mentoring, career advice and motivation to young alumni from seasoned professionals, for potentially rewarding benefits to all members. The IIT Madras Foundation provides a strategic goal for all alumni to contribute towards the growth of their alma mater.

The Boston area is host to a vibrant community of IITM alumni working in technology, education and healthcare. In this spirit, IITMAANA conducted a Kick-off Event to inaugurate the IITMAANA Boston chapter.

On a balmy Saturday Fall afternoon of December 2, IITM alumni across generations gathered for an Inaugural meeting commemorating the IIT MAANA Boston Chapter and the building of a Network of IITM Chapters across the East Coast, held at the prestigious MIT Cambridge in Boston. There was a buffet of delicious food and drinks with scrumptious samosas, organized
by Sanjay Guruprasad. Thank you Sanjay!

An eclectic group of IIT Alumni enthusiastically participated and engaged in interactive discussions, brainstormed innovative ideas, expressed concern areas while providing guidance for a successful Boston chapter and for chapters being launched within the IITMAANA Network. A resounding THANK YOU to Dilip Subramanyam for his dedication, hard work and support over the last 10-20 years for creating and developing the IITMAANA Chapter in Boston. He has now passed the Torch forward to a new team who will spearhead and grow IITMAANA Boston into a thriving organization.

Please welcome the new Appointees for the Boston IITMAANA Chapter:

Roopesh Mathur - President
Suresh Sriramulu - Vice President
Sanjay Guruprasad - Secretary
Treasurer - to be appointed