Director

Satish S. Udpa serves as a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University (MSU) and Campus Mobility Director. Prior to reverting to his current position in October 2019, he served in many administrative capacities at MSU including Acting President, Executive Vice President for Administration, Dean of the College of Engineering, and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Michigan State University is one of the premier land grant universities with an enrollment of over 50,000 students and employing over 12,000 faculty and staff. He also served as the President of the Michigan State University Foundation. Dr. Udpa was the Whitney Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University and a faculty member at Colorado State University before joining Michigan State University in 2001.

Udpa has worked in the area of nondestructive testing since the early 80’s. He has focused his energies on developing a variety of sensors for NDT applications together with tools for modeling and developing them. The NDT systems and the algorithms he has developed for analyzing data generated by sensors are used extensively in industry. He has published extensively, holds ten patents in the field of NDT, and was the technical editor of the Electromagnetic Nondestructive Testing Handbook, published by the American Society for Nondestructive Testing. He served as the editor of the IEEE Transactions on Magnetics and the regional editor of the International Journal of Applied Electromagnetics and Mechanics until recently.  His students have gone on to pursue highly productive careers in industry and academia. As Mobility Director he has championed major initiatives to catalyze several mobility related activities on campus, including the first autonomous (self-driving) bus on campus.

He is a Fellow of the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Indian Society of Nondestructive Testing. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He currently serves as a member of Michigan Governor’s Council on Future Mobility and Electrification.