The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee's newly appointed director Professor Kamal Kishore Pant is targeting the institute to reach among the top-tier institutions globally. Professor K K Pant is also focusing on supporting the establishment of start-ups, going by the recent landscape of unicorns in India.

Sharing his thoughts, Professor K K Pant, Director, IIT Roorkee, said, "IIT Roorkee had celebrated its Sesquicentennial in October 1996 and now completed more than 175 years of its existence. And aligning with the institute’s vision, like all my contemporaries, we will work towards scaling greater heights to create a sustainable and equitable society through teaching of cutting-edge academic content using state-of-the-art methodologies and innovative research in science and technology."

Professor Pant is focusing on a holistic perspective and a comprehensive strategy to accelerate the development of new interdisciplinary fields and to put engineering education on an ambitious path that pushes the frontiers of innovation, discovery, and economic development. A step to develop Hierarchical Intelligent Cyber-Physical Ecosystems is planned, which will enable collaboration between Engineering, Arts, and other Sciences on a much larger scale than has been done before.

IIT Roorkee will focus on areas of Vision 2030 that will result in employable and entrepreneurial engineers. The key emerging interdisciplinary fields that would be the focus of the institute in the coming years include Cyber Engineering, Societal Systems, Living Systems Engineering, Biomechatronics or Robotics Engineering, Cognitive Systems Engineering, Knowledge Engineering, Emergent or Complexity Engineering, and Multiscale Systems Engineering.

Further, identifying the critical societal and regional issues that IIT Roorkee would focus on, Professor Pant said that the researchers of the institute would gear up toward developing solutions for technology development for sustainable energy and environment, smart infrastructure and hardened structures for defence applications, energy storage devices, landslide, snow, and avalanche studies and pulsed laser and specialty fiber, shock and setonics, thermal management.

“The institute is looking to oversee the functioning and well-being of all the faculty, staff, and students to facilitate overall professional development. Our mission statement is clearly to promote IIT Roorkee as a significant hub for training a broader spectrum of international scholars to forge global alliances addressing cutting-edge research and innovation”, added Professor Pant.