Two celebrated Indian-American pioneers, Dr Arogyaswami Paulraj and Dr Sumita Mitra, have been inducted into the US’s prestigious National Inventors Hall of Fame for their path-breaking work in wireless technology and dental technology respectively.
Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, Paulraj pioneered the MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) wireless technology that has “revolutionised broadband wireless Internet access for billions of people worldwide”, said a citation from the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHoF).
The 73-year-old Paulraj, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi, holds 79 patents and has received numerous awards and honours, including the 2014 Marconi Prize and the Padma Bhushan in 2010.
And Mitra’s invention of the first dental filling material to include nanoparticles, leading to the Filtek Supreme product line for teeth restoration, has been used in over 600 million restorations worldwide since its initial launch.
The 69-year-old Mitra, who has a Ph.D. in organic/polymer chemistry from the University of Michigan, holds 98 patents and their international equivalents.
Paulraj and Mitra are among 15 American scientists and innovators to be inducted into the National Hall of Fame this year. All these individuals “whose inventions have made the world a better place” will be honoured at a formal ceremony to be held in Washington in May.
The US Patent and Trademark Office is a major sponsor of the NIHoF and is home to its museum in Alexandria, Virginia.
Paulraj joins eight other famed inventors in wireless technology, inducted to the Hall of Fame: Guglielmo Marconi, Oliver lodge (Wireless Telegraph), Reginald Fessenden (AM radio), Edwin Armstrong (FM Radio), Amos Joel (Cellular tech.), Andrew Viterbi and Irwin Jacobs (CDMA — 3G), Jan Haartsen (Bluetooth).
The US patent holding wireless pioneers include another Indian — Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose for his breakthrough work in radio and microwave optics in 1904.
Reacting to the announcement, Pauraj said: “The NIHoF recognition is a wonderful honour.
I feel enormously humbled to be counted among the inventors who have made the modern world possible.”
“When I joined Stanford in 1992, I had not worked in wireless technology, since my prior years in India were spent on sonar systems with brief forays into AI and Computing,” Paulraj said, noting: “It was perhaps being an outsider that helped me come up with this transformative idea.”
like many big breakthroughs, MIMO faced significant skepticism for a few years, but it eventually took off and is now the foundation of all wireless systems, he commented.
The ubiquitous broadband wireless internet access that the world enjoys today — and 5G in the near future — would not be possible without MIMO technology that has become the basis of all current and future wireless networks, making it the most influential wireless technology in recent decades.
Born in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, Paulraj joined the Indian Navy at age 15. Impressed with his academic record, the Navy sent him to IIT-Delhi, where he earned a Ph.D. for advances to signal filtering theory.