Profile

Professor Pradipta Banerji has been Director of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee from October 2011 to October 2016. He concurrently held the posts of Professor of Civil Engineering at IIT Bombay and at IIT Roorkee. Since November 2016 he has returned to his parent organization, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay as Professor of Civil Engineering, and since February 2017 as the Head, Centre for Urban Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay.
He has been a faculty member at IIT Bombay since April 1988. During this period he was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award, and has been the Dean (Alumni and International Relations) for two terms of three years each, apart from holding various other administrative positions. He has been Visiting Research Professors at Technical University Stuttgart in Germany and University of Manitoba in Canada,
He is known internationally for his developments on Bridge Asset Management using Structural Health Monitoring, especially for the Indian Railways and Network Rail in UK, and Vibration Control of Buildings for Earthquake Ground Motions using innovative strategies. He has also developed technology that has been and is being implemented in India and abroad in the area of disaster resilience and asset management.
He led the initiative of the Government of India in “Sustainable Habitat” under the IMPRINT program. He was an identified expert and delivered a keynote speech at the BRICS Symposium on Urban Transitions 2016. He is a member of the India 75 Task Force on Urbanization, and a member of the India-UK Steering Committee set up to establish Urban Observatories in several cities in India. He has been a consultant to the World Bank from 2004 to 2017, almost exclusively for Higher and Engineering Education and Research in Sub-Saharan Africa. He was responsible for creating the original business plan for the Africa Institutes of Science and Technology, which led to the creation of the Africa University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria and the AIST in Arusha, Tanzania.