SPEAKER BIO-NOTE

Prof. Kannan Moudgalya is an Emeritus Fellow at IIT Bombay in the department of chemical engineering. He was previously an Erach and Mehroo Mehta Chair Professor for Advanced Education Technology at IIT Bombay. He received a B.Tech degree in Chemical Engineering at IIT Madras. He received a Ph.D for a thesis in Chemical Engineering and a Master of Electrical Engineering degree from Rice University. Prof. Kannan’s areas of research interest are modelling, simulation, optimisation, and educational outreach. He has written two textbooks, Digital Control, published by John Wiley & Sons, and Optimization, Theory and Practice, by Narosa.  He has several research articles in international journals and peer reviewed conferences.

Kannan has been focusing on massive IT skills education using open source software through Spoken Tutorial and FOSSEE projects. The FOSSEE project trains students to such a high level that they can become contributors themselves. More than 85 lakh students have been trained using Spoken Tutorial. He is extending the Spoken Tutorial approach to other skill topics, such as health, nutrition, and breastfeeding. This method is now used to train tens of thousands of health workers in more than 15 districts, with very good improvement in the nutrition level of newborns.