Contact: Tom Parisi, Office of Public Affairs
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July 17, 2002

NIU Professor Biswa Datta elected
to prestigious Russian academy

DeKalb, Ill.- Northern Illinois University's Biswa Datta, a professor of mathematics, has been elected as an academician of the Academy of Nonlinear Sciences.

The Academy of Nonlinear Sciences (ANS) is an international organization headquartered in Moscow. Members are recognized for their leadership and outstanding contributions in mathematics, mechanics, control theory and modeling. There are only about 200 members of the Academy worldwide.

Datta, a resident of Geneva, traveled to Moscow for his induction and presented a one-hour plenary address at a meeting sponsored by the ANS and International Federation on Nonlinear Analysis (IFNA). During his trip to Russia, Datta also delivered invited talks at the Summer School for Young Russian Scientists, Rostov State University and St. Petersburg State University. His wife, NIU Professor Karabi Datta, also presented an invited lecture at Rostov State University.

Biswa Datta is scheduled to deliver six more major invited talks this summer and fall at international conferences in China, Mongolia, Poland and Brazil. Last year, Datta was named an NIU Presidential Research Professor, a distinction given to the university's top researchers. His mathematical and computational techniques aim at improving performance and design safety in autos, aircraft, bridges, buildings and highways.

"I work on problems whose solutions are readily applicable to real-life control-and-vibration engineering design and analysis," Datta said. "So I get motivated by the fact that my research will contribute not only to the advancement of science, but also to technological and industrial developments."

Datta is a consultant to such firms as Boeing Company and Wolfram Research Inc., the world's leading technical software company. He has served as a distinguished visiting professor and research scientist at major universities and research laboratories worldwide.

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