Prof. Vikram Deshpande is a Professor of Materials Engineering at the Engineering Department of Cambridge University in UK.
He obtained his B. Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1994, M. Phil. and Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 1995 and 1998 respectively.
After completing his Ph.D., Prof. Deshpande held the Maudslay Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1998 to 2000 followed by a one year stay at Brown University, USA as Visiting Professor and Lindemann Research Fellow. He then returned to Cambridge as a faculty member and has been at Cambridge since except for the period 2006-2008 when he was Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prof. Deshpande has held visiting appointments at number of Universities including Brown University, Technical University of Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Università Campus Bio-Medico in Rome. He also serves on the editorial boards of in excess of 10 journals in his field including the Proceedings of the Royal Society, London and has held editorial positions in numerous journals. In addition, he is currently on the scientific advisory boards of a number of institutions and research centres including “3D Matter made to order” cluster of excellence funded by the German Excellence Strategy, the Institut Polytechnique de Paris and the Technical Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi.
Prof. Deshpande’s work lies at the interface of Engineering, Materials Science and Physics in the general area of mechanics of materials and involves a combination of theory and experiments. Some of his notable work includes: (i) invention of a new class of architected materials for diverse applications including lightweight structures, energy absorption and shock mitigation; (ii) development of theories to exploit fluid structure interaction effects to enhance the blast resistance of land and sea vehicles; (iii) creation of computational tools for interrogating the high-temperature performance of alloys used in engines and (iv) unravelling the role of entropic forces in mechano-transduction within living cells.
Prof. Deshpande has many awards and honors to his credit. Some of these are Fellow, Royal Society of London (2020); Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics (2020); Fellow, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (2020); Sir William Hopkins Prize in Mathematical and Physical Sciences (2018) awarded by the Cambridge Philosophical Society; Werner Koester Award (2017) by the German Society of Materials Science; Philip Leverhulme Prize (2003) by the Leverhulme Trust; Lindemann Research Fellowship (2000).