Narayanan Komerath

Narayanan Komerath is an aerospace engineer and professor. He retired after 40+ years of teaching and research at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and now serves as Chair of the Alliance for a Space Based Economy at Taksha Institute in Virginia. His 500+ publications and 5 U.S. Patents span several areas across aerospace engineering, strategic affairs and advanced concepts. He is a Fellow of the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts since 2000, showing how to build large radiation-shielded structures in orbit for long-term human habitation. This "Tailored Force Fields for Space Based Construction" project won and completed both Phase 1 and Phase 2. In Summer 2004 he was one of Boeing's Welliver Summer Faculty Fellows. From 2004 he served as a Senior Sam Nunn Fellow in the Center for Security, Technology and Policy, and has studied and written on various strategic issues. He works on problems that require ideas and methods from several fields. In 1998 he developed the online Aerospace Digital Library, expanded into the NASA "EXTROVERT" project on enabling learners to innovate across disciplines. This led to the course and book on Design-Centered Introduction to Aerospace Engineering. In 2006 as a member of the NASA-sponsored "8th Continent Chamber of Commerce" he developed a course and ultimately a textbook on Micro Renewable Energy Systems, leading to a Smart Village Roadmap for rural energy independence. In 2012 he was awarded a "Bharat Gaurav" (Pride of India) award by the Friends of India Society in New Delhi. In 2015 co-author Padma Komerath (who holds MS degrees in engineering and computerscience) and he published their book on Sanatana Dharma. In 2015/16 he won the John Leland Atwood of the American Society of Engineering Education and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for excellence in Aerospace engineering education. He is a Board Member of the World Association for Vedic Studies and the Global Indian Business Council. His research team continues to solve fundamental problems in turbulence and aerodynamics research, with recent breakthroughs in bluff-body aerodynamics, and the dynamics of complex objects flown at speed as slung loads. His team and he have won several awards, including the unique distinction that 4 of his 19 PhDs have won GT's Sigma Xi Outstanding PhD Thesis award (top 1%) and 5 more have been finalists (top 10%) for it.