Suhas Pandurang Sukhatme was born to Indumati Sukhatme and Pandurang Vasudeo Sukhatme, renowned statistician and a Padma Bhushan award winner, on 5 November 1938 at Baroda in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra. He graduated in Engineering in 1958 from the Banares Hindu University and pursued his higher studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He secured a master's degree in 1960, a higher degree in Engineering in 1961, and a doctoral degree in 1964. During his stay at MIT, he worked as a research assistant during 1959–64. He moved to Dynatech Corporation where he worked for a year as a staff engineer. In 1965, he returned to India to join the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay as an assistant professor at the department of mechanical engineering. After a series of promotions, as the professor in 1970, as the head of the department in 1973, and as the deputy director in 1975, he became the director of the institution in 1995, a post he held till he retired in 2000 with the title of the Professor Emeritus of the institution. During this period, he also had a brief stint at the Iowa State University as a visiting professor in the academic year, 1982–83. Post retirement from IIT Bombay, he worked as the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board of the Government of India from 2000 till 2005. Suhas Sukhatme holds the life memberships of the Indian Society for Heat and Mass Transfer and the Solar Energy Society of India and is a former member of the Indian National Science Academy council. He serves as a member of the Promotions and Assessment Committee of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Nuclear Sciences Research Board of the Department of Atomic Energy, and the advisory councils of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. He also sits in the Governing Board of two national institutions, the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai and the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai. Sukhatme is an author of over 70 scientific papers and three books viz. A Textbook on Heat Transfer, Solar Energy - Principles of Thermal Collection and Storage and The Real Brain Drain. His contributions are known behind the establishment of an inter-disciplinary postgraduate and research programme in Energy Systems Engineering at IIT Bombay. The program has grown over the years to become an independent department, the Department of EnergyScience and Engineering. He has also assisted in the formation of Mumbai-based institutions, the Shailesh J Mehta School of Management and the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology. Suhas Sukhatme is married to Shobha, a medical doctor and has two children, Gaurav, a member of faculty at the University of Southern California and Jai, teaching at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The couple lives in Powai, Mumbai.
