Meet the First Female Director of First IIT Outside India; Preeti Aghalayam

Meet the First Female Director of First IIT Outside India; Preeti Aghalayam

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Zanzibar campus, which is slated to become the prestigious institution’s first offshore campus, will also be the first IIT campus to be overseen by a woman director. Preeti Aghalayam has been named as the director-in-charge of the IIT Zanzibar campus, with the first Academic Session beginning in October.

Preeti Aghalayam graduated from IIT Madras with a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering. She is a Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at IIT Madras, where she has worked since 2010. The Zanzibar campus of IIT Madras will be the first IIT outside of India.

The First Female Director of IIT Zanzibar, Preeti Aghalayam says, “I am an alumnus of IIT Madras, and doing something of this magnitude for the institute and for the country is such a big honor. Every time we visited Zanzibar as part of the IIT Madras contingent, we noticed that the representation of women on their side is quite significant. So, it was important that we do this mindfully.”

“Aghalayam is the first woman to be an IIT director. We will see many more encouraging things. We are following sustainable development goals and one of the important goals suggests that we need to bring in gender balance,” IIT Madras director V Kamakoti said at a press conference.

MoU signed between India and Tanzania:

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was recently signed between India and Tanzania, allowing IIT Madras to open its first international campus in Tanzania’s Zanzibar. The institute offers two full-time academic programs and applications for admission are now being accepted.

Aghalayam graduated with a BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1995. She then went on to complete her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, Cambridge, and afterward as a faculty member at IIT Bombay after completing her Doctorate.
Aghalayam has been with IIT Madras since 2010, where she is currently a Professor in the Chemical Engineering department. She was just named one of the Principal Scientific Advisor’s office’s 75 Women in STEM.

The permanent campus would be extended across 200 acres on Zanzibar Island, with IIT Madras experts developing the Master plan. The admissions process for the first Academic Year 2023-24 has already begun, with classes set to begin in October 2023. During the early days of this institution, faculty will be deputed from IIT Madras or recruited from India.