Pan-IIT, Pacific Northwest

Portland Section: President – Atul Mathur

http://www.iitpnw.org

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iit_oregon

Pacific Northwest Chapter covers the states of Alaska, Idaho, Washington and Oregon in United States and British Columbia in Canada. The chapter has the vision and strength to bring together and emphasize activities of local sections of the chapter while preserving and leveraging its regional nature covering several states. Oregon section has a governing body of an elected executive board and several advisors.  The chapter coordinates interactions with like-minded organizations in the region to promote shared goals. Its goals include:

• Social & professional networking among the IIT alumni in the region.
• Representing Pacific Northwest IIT alumni community to the global Pan-IIT organization and support its projects and IIT branding efforts
• Actively promoting technical, business and educational collaborations between Pacific Northwest and India
• Giving back to our adopted country and states, facilitating interaction with the students and visitors from India and fellow IIT alumni and giving back to IITs

In addition to the shared events of the chapter, Pacific Northwest chapter has monthly meetings or events held locally in Portland and Seattle. The Portland event is on the last Saturday afternoon of every month, which is either a team-building fun activity or a project oriented meeting. The Seattle event is on the third Wednesday evening of the month. Seattle section has organized technical panel discussions on the following topics:

• Mobile Advertising – Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities
• Search Engine Freshness
• Software as a Service

Pacific Northwest chapter is helping coordinate two projects:

• IITians for ITI program is a Pan-IIT program envisioned to improve ITIs (Industrial Training Institutes) and drive sustainable excellence in India's vocational/technical training.  
• Farmer's hostel at IIT/KGP project’ goal is to contribute to the rural transformation in India by helping build the farmer’s training infrastructure of IIT Kharagpur’s Agricultural department.

Dr. Mohan Venkataramana, Pan-IIT Pacific Northwest

• Graduated from IITM in 1974

Dr. Mohan Venkataramana is an entrepreneur and the president of Syntonix, Inc., a technology and business development company based in Seattle which he founded with the goal of helping start-up companies to develop a strong foundation in technology. He graduated from IIT Chennai with distinction in Chemical Engineering and went on to complete his doctoral studies at MIT. He also has a M.S degree in Energy Engineering from University of Illinois at Chicago. Mohan’s professional experience spans several areas, including Chemical Engineering/Chemistry, Telecommunications, Information Technology, Life Sciences, as well as Energy Systems.  He led the MultiQuest 900 Service project team for AT&T Bell Laboratories, managing the technology needs of the $3 billion business opportunity. He has also completed projects for Amazon, Microsoft, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center where he worked on managing the IT needs of global HIV Vaccine Trials.

Mohan is passionate about advancing science and math education among K-12 children (Verinza Center for Mathematics and Science) as well as mentoring young entrepreneurs (www.iitea.org and Albers Business School of Seattle University). Mohan also is very active in supporting community activities in India and is serving as the president of the India Rural Community Projects Initiative (www.ircpi.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the needs of the rural communities in India in healthcare, renewable energy, sustainable environment and education.

Mohan is active in Pan-IIT and spearheaded the formation of the Pan-IIT Pacific Northwest Chapter. He managed the creation of the working teams in the Seattle local section and help set the overall focus and direction of the chapter, with an emphasis on the local member interactions. Mohan is also a member of TiE-Seattle, and is actively working to establish collaborative partnership activities between TiE and Pan-IIT in Pacific Northwest and promote IIT branding in the region.

Atul Mathur, Pan-IIT Pacific Northwest (Portland)

Atul Mathur graduated from IIT Kanpur with a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering in 1984, and started his career at Telco, Pune. In Telco, Atul spent about 6 months at its Training Division to work on the design and developed of an arc welding robot. This robot was recognized as the first functioning indigenous robot in India. Atul worked in India for a total of 8 years, most of which was in CAD/CAM software development. In early 90s, Atul had founded a startup aimed at developing CAD products in India for international markets.  Atul has also worked at Siemens in Germany and at Intel in Oregon.  Atul has two software patents. Atul is working for Autodesk in software development and is one of the founding members of the Autodesk Inventor team. Autodesk Inventor is a CAD/CAM product which has been recently adopted by several IITs. 

Atul lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Kanchan and two school age children. As a hobby, Atul is an amateur musician and plays bass guitar and keyboard. Atul is taking flight lessons towards a private pilot license. Atul hails from a family of IITians. His grand uncle, uncle, father, both brothers, wife and brother-in-law attended IITs at Kanpur, Roorkee, Delhi and Kharagpur campuses.

Atul is a founding member of the Pan-IIT Pacific Northwest chapter, and is serving as the first elected president of the chapter’s Oregon section. Atul is the coordinator of the program launch team for the Pan-IIT "IITians for ITIs" program which is envisioned to improve ITIs and drive sustainable excellence in India’s vocational/technical training.

Salil Dave, Pan-IIT Pacific Northwest (Seattle)

Education

• IIT Kanpur, B.Tech. (EE), 1986
• IIM Ahmedabad, PGDM, 1988
• Harvard University, MPA, 1996

Work

• Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, 2002-present
• i2 Technologies, Dallas, TX, 1996-2002
• Indian Revenue Service (IRS), 1988-1994

I have been a die-hard fan of the IIT community for the past two decades.  At Microsoft I have mobilized IITians by establishing mailing lists and organizing IIT events.  Mohan and Atul are the fearless leaders in the PNW region, and I’m happy to help them as needed.  I have also enjoyed working with Atul on the ‘IITians for ITI’ initiative.

15 years ago, when I was in the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) in India, I established “iContact” – a community of IIT and IIM alumni in the IAS, IPS, IRS and other civil services.  I believe that this group of IITians is uniquely positioned to make a significant impact on the biggest challenges facing the country – it can become a nodal point for channelizing ideas and resources of the rest of the IIT alumni in the business and academic circles.

Currently I am helping roll out a technology-enabled solution to bring quality education to underprivileged children in Kanpur.  While a student at IITK in the 80s, I used to be a volunteer-teacher at Prerana Shishu Vidyalaya – today the school has 300+ children from Kanpur slums, and I am working to connect it to the “Digital StudyHall” initiative (http://dsh.cs.washington.edu)