About Ajit R. Jadhav

Ajit Jadhav is a well-experienced engineer from Pune, India.

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Details:

A scholar right from his school days, Mr. Ajit R. Jadhav received his B. E. (Metallurgy) degree in First Class with Distinction from the College of Engineering (COEP), University of Poona, in 1983. At COEP, apart from picking up engineering he also enjoyed a wide range of extra-curricular activities including boating, trekking, sketching people, landscape paintings in watercolor, and dramatics (both script-writing and stage acting in award-winning intercollegiate competitions). He was nominated to the post of Art Circle Secretary in the Student Gymkhana of COEP.

After obtaining work-experience for a couple of years, Mr. Jadhav pursued M. Tech. in Industrial Metallurgy at IIT Madras, and received the degree in 1987. He discovered an underwater form of arc during his M. Tech. project–the first time he had achieved a “first in the world.” The project work was awarded the highest possible letter-grade of ‘Excellent’ i.e. 10/10 points, at IIT Madras. He was also one of the three student representatives elected on the Student Affairs Council of the Institute, together representing the concerns of about 450 M. Tech. students.

After further work experience of a few years, in 1990, he received a Graduate School Fellowship for pursuing a Ph. D. program in Materials Engineering in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). From 1990 to 1993, he completed 32 credit-hours with a GPA of 3.16/4.00. However, due to an odd set of reasons, he was twice failed in certain sections of the Ph. D. qualifying examination, and thus, could not complete the Ph. D. degree itself. His project guides at UAB subsequently gave him sufficiently good references that he could receive a further PhD admission in the Mechanics and Materials group in a much higher ranked university: UCSD. However, just about the same time, this UCSD group itself lost much of its ongoing research funding, and so, due to lack of funds, Mr. Jadhav could not actually join them.

After returning to India, Mr. Jadhav worked for a few months in Pune as a metallurgical consultant, and then, in 1994, he pursued C-DAC’s post-graduate Diploma in Advanced Computing, raising loan for this education. He was attempting to combine his older interest in mechanics, and a curiosity about computational mechanics, by pursing this Diploma. At C-DAC, Mr. Jadhav was one of the two least experienced ‘C’ programmers at the beginning of the course. Yet, his project work on FEM of static electric fields went on to receive second-best marks at the end of it. Since the completion of this Diploma, Mr. Jadhav has been working in the field of software development.

From the year 2003, Mr. Jadhav has become active in the field of computational mechanics. In the years 2005–2007, he pursued the Ph. D. degree once again, now in the Mechanical Engineering branch, and now at COEP, University of Pune. (He declined an offer for a PhD at IIT Madras because the department would be Metallurgical and Materials, not Applied Mechanics or Mechanical Engineering.) His Ph. D. research at COEP was on a new approach in computational mechanics that he himself invented. He has already submitted his Ph. D. thesis in the year 2007 and expects to receive the degree this year.

Mr. Jadhav in all has about 14 years of work-experience: about 5 years in engineering industries, mostly in application engineering of high-tech electronic equipment for NDT, and about 9 years at the cutting edge of professional software development, mostly in VC++ on the Windows platform. In software development, he has spent 4 years (from 1997 to 2001) as a consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has also led small teams of about 5 post-graduate engineers each during software development, and up to 20 people in all during installation and commissioning of NDT engineering equipment.

Mr. Jadhav has so far made experimental discoveries, invented fresh conceptual approaches, or otherwise achieved notable firsts in the world for more than five times. Some of his work represents perspectives that are fresh in as many as 75, 187 and 200 years. Although he does not believe in the dictum of “publish-or-perish,” he has nevertheless published 8 papers and 2 extended abstracts, all in peer-reviewed international conferences or journals. The papers touch upon the topics of the aforementioned achievements, and come from various subjects: computational mechanics, composite materials, and quantum physics. These scholarly papers together cover all of the previously mentioned achievements, at least in essential terms. Additionally, Mr. Jadhav has also written a short monograph on eddy current NDT.

More recently, in the year 2007, one of the pieces on solid mechanics he wrote at iMechanica—the Harvard-based online discussion forum—tried to establish the precise hierarchy among the fundamental concepts of solid mechanics. This piece of writing, touching on the very fundamental notions as it did, generated a lot of interest in the world-wide community of solid mechanics experts. (It has also become an all time favorite at that site. Currently, it is within top 10 out of about 2,500 threads at that site.)

Mr. Jadhav’s current research interests mainly lie in the computational engineering sciences. Most recently, he has become active in the field of high-performance cluster-based computing, especially, that for fluid dynamical problems.

History of science (and more generally, history of ideas), and philosophy are two among his more enduring intellectual interests.

Currently, and for the 6.5 years out of the last 7 years, Mr. Jadhav has been out of job. He is single, and for his own survival, he is forced to live off the meager pension of his father (a retired civil engineer). Only the cultural context of India–wherein tradition (good or bad) dominates just about every area of life (i.e. if and when bureaucracy by itself proves inadequate), wherein parents select spouses for their offspring, and wherein parents continue to take care of their children for an unusually longer time—might seem to make this indignity somewhat palatable. That is, apart from Mr. Jadhav’s own unshakeable belief that contrary to the fact of his prolonged unemployment, he is, actually, very much employable in the field of software development for CAE and/or computational mechanics. Needless to add, Mr. Jadhav does not own a house, a car, or a dog. The city he thus lives in is Pune, India.

Personal Web site: http://www.JadhavResearch.info
General Blog: http://ajitjadhav.wordpress.com
Mechanics-Related Blog: http://www.iMechanica.org/user/1150