I have the fondest memories of Pune,” says a nostalgic Prof Thomas Kailath who has been awarded Padmabhushan this year for his contribution to science. For the US-based scientist, Pune holds a special place in the heart. An alumnus of both St Vincent’s School and the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), Kailath feels it is his social responsibility to pledge a grant of $100,000 to his alma mater and encourage budding engineers to apply technological solutions to socially relevant issues.

Kailath, a Keralite who studied in Pune, is Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University and has supervised around 80 PhD theses. “I received an excellent education from these institutions in Pune,” Kailath told The Indian Express when contacted in California, US.

Kailath had challenged the COEP alumni based in US to match his grant of $100,000 (about Rs 47 lakh). They did that by aggregating around $108,000 and COEP is now set to receive a corpus of Rs 1 crore for encouraging students to take up technological solutions for social issues.

“We have an ambitious master plan for the development of the COEP and have been contacting our alumni in the US and other places,” says Dr Anil Sahasrabuddhe, director of the COEP.

Sahasrabuddhe, who met Kailath in the US, said the COEP will get $100,000 from the scientist and it will be specifically earmarked to encourage students to take up socially relevant projects. It could be finding solutions for the problem of pollution or any social issue, he said.

Recalling his days in Pune in the 1950s and 1960s, Kailath said though the classes were much shorter, the students were exposed to good training in mathematics and English by the Italian priests at St Vincent’s School. He recalled particularly the contribution of Fr Alphons Oesch and mathematics teacher G M Joshi. “Mr Joshi told me once that I was a serious student and encouraged me to join Fergusson College,” Kaliath said.

A stint at the COEP and enrolment in one of the then newly-introduced programmes in telecom engineering fetched him offers from Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kailath got his Masters degree in 1959 and his doctorate in 1961, both from the MIT. He was the first Indian-born student to receive a doctorate in electrical engineering from the MIT.