Ramavataram Fellow Completes Year in US

Mahantappa Jogad, a professor of physics at the Sharanabasaveshwar College of Science in Gulbarga, Karnataka, India, recently completed his tenure as the 2000 recipient of the APS Ramavataram Fellowship. A distinguished scholar and award-winning teacher with 22 years of experience in India, Jogad's area of scientific expertise is thin films, polymers, and glass and glass-ceramics.

The Ramavataram Fund was established in 1983 through donations from family and friends of K. Ramavataram, an Indian-born teacher and researcher in nuclear and molecular physics. The fund's aim is to improve undergraduate physics teaching in India by allowing Indian physics teachers to visit institutions in North America, to observe and study teaching methods. K. Ramavataram was a professor of physics at l 'Université Laval in Québec at the time of his death in 1977. The fund provides about $5K of stipends to each recipient, with the host institution in the US and other grants providing other financial support as needed.

Jogad, who received a Fulbright Fellowship for the same academic year, split his tenure between three institutions in the US: Michigan State University, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Missouri. While here, he conducted experiments on fusion heat and melting points of solids, as well as dielectric studies of glass-ceramics and polymers, presenting a paper on glass-ceramics at the 2001 APS March Meeting in Seattle and submitting two papers for journal publication. Jogad also learned new teaching methods using a computer interface to take back with him to India.