Kuppuswamy Kalyanasundaram

Kuppuswamy Kalyanasundaram is a senior scientist and researcher in chemistry at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. His major research interests are in photochemistry and solar energy conversion, storage. He is part of the research group that developed "Dye Sensitized Solar Cells". He is best known for his work in Tamil computing and as the founder of Project Madurai.

Life

Dr. Kalyanasundaram completed B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Chemistry at the University of Madras in 1969 and 1971 respectively. He received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from University of Notre Dame in 1976. Following a two-year post-doctoral work at the Royal Institution of London, UK, he joined the teaching and research staff of the Chemistry Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology where he remains till today. He has held visiting faculty appointments at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. He also holds appointment as Overseas Visiting Professor at the Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

Works related to Tamil language

• Created and is maintaining Tamil Electronic Library since 1995.
• Created the Tamil font Mylai in 1989 which made it easier to type Tamil in computers without any specialized software.
• He spearheaded the initiative to create an 8-bit Tamil encoding TSCII
• Founded Project Madurai initiative to bring ancient (and modern) Tamil literature into digital format
• One of the founding members of INFITT

Awards

• Outstanding Scientist of Indian Origin, Chemical Research Society of India (CRSI), February 2012
• Sundara Ramasamy Award for Contributions to Tamil Computing/Tamil IT, Tamil Literary Garden, University of Toronto, 2008
• University of California, Berkeley Tamil Chair Award for "Taking Tamil to the e-World", Berkeley, 2009