V.S.K. Murthy Balijepalli and Vanteru Mahendra Reddy selected for their research project considered as path-breaking in their respective fields

Two Telugu students have made the State proud making it into MIT's India TR35 2012 young technology innovators list among the 20 selected across the country for their innovative projects.

The list of innovators was recently released by the Indian Edition of MIT Technology review for the year 2012.

All the chosen innovators are under 35 years and have contributed in diverse areas like computing, transportation, biomedicine, energy, communications, materials and the web.

V.S.K. Murthy Balijepalli and Vanteru Mahendra Reddy – both presently pursuing research at IIT Bombay hail from the State and their research is being considered as path-breaking in their respective fields. While V.S.K. Murthy made it to the list for developing a method to estimate electricity cost, grid frequency and load that can help make power networks smarter, Mahendra Reddy was chosen for development of a lab-scale flameless combustion with liquid fuels.

They will present their innovations at the Emerging Technologies conference at Bangalore this month in front of a team of eminent scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) USA.

Mr. Murthy who did his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from JNTU Hyderabad in 2007 was inducted into Ph.D programme in IIT Bombay based on his B.Tech and M.Tech projects. Mr. Murthy who hails from Vishakapatnam rejected job offers from top companies to do his Ph.D given his interest in research.

His research work has a direct applicability in the forecasting of electricity parameters like Electricity market price, load, wind energy and frequency and has earlier bagged the Department of Science and Technology (DST) - Lockheed Martin innovator award for being in top 50 technologies. Though he has several job offers in the US right now, Mr. Murthy prefers to take up teaching position in the new IITs so that he can pursue his research interests.

On the other hand, Mahender Reddy, alumnus of JNTU Kakinada and IIT Kanpur, got into the list of innovators with his work on suppressing the formation of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO) and unburned hydrocarbons that are responsible for acid rain.

Offers

Mr. Reddy, who is doing his Ph.D in Aerospace Engineering says that his present work focuses on the development of a laboratory scale flameless combustor with a typical 20 kW thermal input and using kerosene as fuel and air as oxidizer at ambient conditions.

Hailing from Agraharam near Kavali, Mr. Reddy too plans to take up teaching in the IITs rather than going abroad despite several offers beckoning him.