Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham – is a University, established under section 3 of the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act of 1956. The University Grants Commission is the apex body of the Government of India for higher education. On May 19, 2007 Amrita University awarded 1313 Degrees including its first Ph.D. in medicine.
Drawing its inspiration, guidance, nourishment, energy, and resources directly from AMMA, AMRITA Vishwa Vidyapeetham has now grown into a dynamic, 5-campus, multi-disciplinary, University with over 15 schools, 75 degree programs, 1000 faculty, and 7000 students (www.amrita.edu/campusesandschools) , all united in their mission towards solving the monumental scientific and societal challenges being faced by the world today.
In the past four years, Amrita has been on a steep trajectory to quickly achieve a world-class status. In its second year itself (2004), AMRITA became the Nation's First Multi-Campus University to be inter-networked via Satellite, enabling live interactive inter-campus classrooms. As a result of this historic launch, Amrita University is strategically positioned to lead the way in multi-disciplinary higher education, research, and technology innovation as they are applied to multi-farious disciplines and societal needs.
One of the most valuable aspects of AMRITA is its environment and ambience for inter-disciplinary research, between its schools of biotechnology (including life sciences), engineering, and medicine. Our Center for Biotechnology, with its funding from TIFAC and international corporate partners such as MDS Pharma Services (world's largest pharmaceutical research outsourcing company), was dedicated by Secretary of Science and Technology. This Center has attracted world-class full-time faculty from Seattle, Tennesse, UCLA, and the University of Texas. The Center has embarked on ambitious interdisciplinary projects such as an adaptive and automatic insulin pump, the first prototype of which is undergoing animal trials, and is in the process of being patented under the US patent law and licensed by Biocon, India's largest Pharmaceutical company.
Amrita’s flagship colleges of engineering, have attracted reputed faculty from all over the world, who have moved permanently from prestigious schools such as Illinois, UT Austin, Purdue, Harvard, Pacific Bell, Berkeley, Rutgers, Simon Fraser, Ohio State, and IIT Madras (http://amrita.edu/new/faculty/index.htm) after they came in contact with AMMA, who has been a fountainhead of inspiration to transform the conventional “brain drain” from India into a “brain gain” for India. The beneficiaries are students, who, when they graduate, are much sought after by hundreds of companies.
Amrita has been catapulted into global research initiatives: winsoc (www.winsoc.org) that aims to create and deploy new wireless sensor networks environmental monitoring (such as, landslide detection) jointly with 10 European partners; and signing of a landmark research agreement with one of the largest Universities of the world, namely, the University of California System, in which joint research projects have the potential to receive bilateral funding of up to a total of $10 MM per year. Our Hospital Information System, which transformed the 1300-bed super-specialty Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences into an all-digital hospital, was selected as the exclusive system of choice by Hewlett Packard and by Maharastra (one of the largest states with the cit of Mumbai as its capital) at all of its 19 state-wide hospitals and medical colleges (news). The Intelligent Telematics project funded at our Amrita Research Labs, which is creating new and affordable automatic telematics vehicular units for metropolitan-area public transportation networks, already successfully deployed and tested on Konkan Railway’s Skybus.. Another team of researchers lead the design and development of a fault-tolerant network controller for BARC. The Center for Digital Health which has been awarded funding from the Media Lab Asia to develop wireless enabled ubiquitous telemedicine services. Many other noteworthy patents, products, and technologies such as the Amrita university management systems, Amrita-ISRO x-ray digitizer, Amrita-ISRO video conferencing system, and Amrita school software (Balavidya), have also started to see the market.
AMRITA University also architected and lead a consortium of Indian organizations including the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to sign a landmark Indo-US University Initiative, first with five top-ranked US Universities namely, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Cornell, CMU, and SUNY Buffalo, during the visit of the Indian Prime Minister on July 20, 2005, to Washington, DC, and subsequently with fifteen top-ranked universities including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Purdue, UT Austin, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Washington, University of Maryland, etc. at the Presidential House in New Delhi on December 8, 2005, following which, distinguished academic leaders from these Universities, including the deans of engineering at Harvard and Princeton called on AMMA at our Amritapuri campus.
Amrita University, under the direction of its parent organization, Mata Amritanandamayi Math, has also been in the forefront of societal relief and help. After rushing to contribute significantly towards relief and reconstruction in Kerala and Tamil immediately following the Tsunami of December 2004, Amrita hosted a day-long round-table on technologies for disaster warning and management with representatives from ISRO, leading industries such as Fujitsu, and Stanford University. Mata Amritanandamayi Math also became the first organization to hand over fully built best of breed houses, thousands in number, to Tsunami affected populations of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and even as far as Sri Lanka. Even as far as the American Continent, Mata Amritanandamayi Math gave USD 1 Million for Katrina Relief directly to the Bush-Clinton fund. On the architectural side, this is also the location of the famous Amrita Setu–built to facilitate rapid transit for people from the water-locked peninsular region. During this time, Amrita TV, now regarded as a highly rated channel in India but with a global reach, joined the larger Amrita family of institutions and services. Amrita campuses have transformed the cluster of rural villages surrounding them into a vibrant landscape with significant education (starting from primary to higher secondary schools – about 60 schools called Amrita Vidyalayams all over India) and employment, thereby uplifting the entire region. In December of 2006, a six-crore bridge of Alappad to mainland Kerala was commissioned by the Math. Amrita’s nation-wide network of village resource centers launched by India’s President, makes it possible for school children and communities from eight different villages to simultaneously interact over high bandwidth interactive (two-way) audio and video communication with experts from Amrita University and Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences. Several prominent multinational corporations such as Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Cognizant, Oracle, Dhanalakshmi Bank, Infosys, also invested significantly here at AMRITA towards developing information and communication technologies for India's vast rural population.
Even more to come: we are in the brink of launching India's first of its kind full-fledged dual MS program in IT and IT enabled services ("MITES") jointly with SUNY Buffalo, New York; a School of Social Work in collaboration with Cleveland State University, Ohio; and in collaboration with University of Massachusetts-Amherst, a multi-million dollar nanotechnology center with a unique focus on nano-bio materials for tissue engineering.
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