|
Siva by Kent Chamberlin We are very fortunate to have on our faculty someone who is not only highly regarded in his field, but also someone who has a true world perspective about life in general. That faculty member, Kondagunta Sivaprasad, is generally known simply as Siva. Siva has had a lot of varied life experiences in different places around the world. These experiences, which weren't always pleasant, brought him to the level of expertise that he enjoys today and gave him insights into the way that the world operates few of us have. Siva began his college education in India, where entrance requirements and the academic workload are quite different from what they are in this country. In India, only the top ½ to 1% of high school graduates are admitted to engineering programs- similar to getting into the Ivy Leagues here. The program itself is considerably more rigorous than ours, involving 40 contact hours per week, or about twice our own. To make matters worse, there are no liberal arts courses to ease the load. As with the European educational system, only one exam is given per year. Students are responsible for all material in the book, even if it is not covered in class; and that single, closed-book exam determines the grade for the entire course. So, if you take the exam on a bad day, you might be in trouble. But despite these difficulties, Siva did just fine, and was accepted directly into Harvard University's doctoral program in applied physics after obtaining his bachelor's degree. As you might imagine, it can be pretty tough moving to a totally different culture, and Siva experienced some difficulty in making the transition. At that time, only about a hundred Indians lived in all of Boston, so he didn't have many fellow countrymen around to help him acclimatize. Getting sick didn't help either. He did "stumble" during the first semester, but soon he again excelled. It helped that he had no outside activities (hobbies or athletics) to prevent him from fully devoting himself to the studies. Yet he did take some courses in music and philosophy to round out his education. After earning his Ph.D., Siva alternately lived in India and in the United States. He taught engineering in India for a year, accepted a postdoctoral position at Hanscom Air Force Base for a year and a half, taught for two and a half more years in India, spent a year at the University of Houston, and finally came to the University of New Hampshire as a visiting assistant professor in 1969, where he has remained. During his time as a migrant professor, he married his wife, Indira, by an arranged marriage. Arranged marriages are quite foreign to most Americans; however, as many Indians like to point out, the divorce rate is considerably lower for arranged marriages than for "Love" marriages. Siva has served his four sabbaticals at prestigious institutions. For example, he has spent sabbaticals at the Technical University of Denmark, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and Hanscom Air Force Base. All of the sabbaticals were funded positions paid for by the host institutions. His last sabbatical involved back-to-back appointments at the Technical University of Budapest and Aveiro University in Portugal. A general observation that Siva, having spent a lot of time at foreign universities, has made is that students in American universities tend to have far greater access to their professors than in the other parts of the world that he has seen. In general, meetings with professors outside of class are relatively rare and are far more formal than they are here. Throughout his professional career, Siva has regularly attended conferences, both national and international. These conferences have taken him to both India and Europe many times, and to China and Japan on several occasions. In addition to furthering his understanding of electromagnetics, attending these conferences has added to his knowledge about different cultures and customs. Siva and Indira live in a beautiful house in Portsmouth, which provides convenient access to UNH and to Siva's consulting work with Mitre Corporation and Teradyne. Siva also provides support for UNH's InterOperability Laboratory (IOL). His research interests range from biomedical engineering to inverse scattering, where the properties of a structure are determined by an analysis of the waves reflected from it. To list all of the varied projects that Siva has worked on in the past would take several pages. So, in the interests of brevity, it can simply be stated that if something involves electromagnetics, Siva has probably worked on it in one way or another. A good example of others’ regard for Siva's capabilities in the area of electromagnetics is that he has been chosen for the prestigious Electromagnetics Academy, whose members number fewer than 100. Siva has not only pursued education for himself, but has sought it for his only child, Rahul, as well. When Rahul was growing up, Siva or Indira would drive him to Boston every Saturday morning to attend enrichment classes at either the Museum of Science or the New England Conservatory of Music. Rahul is now in graduate school in Los Angeles, and expects to receive his master's degree sometime next year. Siva's philosophy of teaching is that professors shouldn't "hold students hands" or "spoon feed" information. Rather, they should provide the structure for learning, and answer questions. Not surprisingly, this has caused some consternation to students who are not prepared to ferret out information on their own. Siva's philosophy of life in general is that we share the problems of the world in common: we're all working for happiness, although we may achieve this end by different means. A balance of ambition and contentment, he feels, and a balance in one's life in general, are important elements to achieving this end. He appears to have obtained this balance for himself and, by being a good role model, he helps others obtain it as well. |
