Two students of Manipal Institute of Technology, MAHE, Manipal, Akshatha Kamath, Computer Science & Engineering and Dhruv Suri, Aeronautical Engineering, have been awarded the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholarship for pursuing Master’s Program at Stanford University, USA. The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program is a prestigious award that fosters a multidisciplinary, multicultural community of emerging leaders from around the world and guides them to collaborate, innovate, and communicate as they prepare to address the complex challenges facing the society. Akshatha Kamath and Dhruv Suri are the only 2 students selected from India among the total of 76 students representing 26 countries that have made to the program this year.

Akshatha Kamath hails from Udupi and will be pursuing her Master’s degree in Education Data Science at Stanford Graduate School of Education. She is passionate to develop solutions for personalized learning for diverse learning needs. She has also developed a platform called ‘SantaNet’ to connect the underprivileged orphans with motivated volunteers. Akshatha has also developed several medical technologies winning her the MIT Covid 19 Challenge. She also won the Stanford Health ++ Hackathon at Stanford University, with travel support from the Dr TMA Pai Endowment Chair in Health Informatics, Manipal.

Dhruv Suri is from Delhi and will be pursuing his Master’s degree in energy resources engineering at Stanford School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences. He aspires to work at the nexus of energy and climate and help vulnerable communities overcome access barriers in India and other developing countries. Dhruv is a co-founder of Candela Energy, a last mile distribution organization providing rural villages access to life-improving products and has been awarded by ETH student project house in Switzerland and EarthTech in Australia.

Dr. D Srikanth Rao, Director MIT, MAHE, expressed happiness on the achievement of MIT students. “The students have made MIT proud and hope that they will continue to contribute in solving the problems faced by our society and emerge as future leaders. MIT’s culture of experiential learning and encouragement towards societal outreach has borne fruits”, he opined.