Prof. Pawan Sinha
Award Year: 2012 | Degree Year: 1988
Prof. Pawan Sinha received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1988. He subsequently received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and 1995 respectively.
Prof. Sinha currently is a tenured Professor of Computational and Visual Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Using a combination of experimental and computational modeling techniques, research in Prof. Sinha’s laboratory focuses on understanding how the human brain learns to recognize objects through visual experience and how objects are encoded in memory. Prof. Sinha’s experimental work on these issues involves studying healthy individuals and also those with neurological disorders such as autism. The goal is not only to derive clues regarding the nature and development of high-level visual skills, but also to create better therapeutic routines to help children overcome visual impairments. Prof. Sinha founded Project Prakash in 2005 with the twin goals of providing treatment to children with disabilities and also understanding mechanisms of learning and plasticity in the brain. Project Prakash has provided insights into some of the most fundamental questions about brain function while also transforming the lives of many blind children by bringing them the gift of sight. He also is a founder of Imagen Inc, a company that applies insights regarding human image processing to challenging real-world machine vision problems. Imagen was the winner of the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship competition.
Prof. Sinha is a recipient of the PECASE – the highest US Government award for young scientists, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Neuroscience, the John Merck Scholars Award for research on developmental disorders, the Jeptha and Emily Wade Award for creative research, and the Troland Award from the National Academies. Prof. Sinha was named a Global Indus Technovator, and was also inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for creating the world’s smallest reproduction of a printed book. He also has received the Dean’s Award for Advising and Teaching at MIT.
In honouring Prof. Pawan Sinha, IIT Delhi recognizes the outstanding contributions made by him as a Researcher, Scientist, Educator, and in Public Service. Through his achievements, Prof. Pawan Sinha has brought glory to the name of the Institute.
