(Our Bureau, June 26) Ashok Soota’s SKAN Medical research trust has donated a grant of ₹20 crore ($2.7 million) to his alma mater IIT Roorkee (IIT-R) to encourage medical research. The fund will be used to sponsor a Chair Professorship, three faculty fellowships, joint research projects, and build a wet lab. IIT-R is engaged in research in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering and the first project under this agreement will focus on bipolar disease. The 78-year-old founder of Happiest Minds Technologies, said in a statement,
“There is negligible private funding towards medical research in India and I was pleased to see that IIT-R is doing excellent work in this area. I see this as a good opportunity for me to contribute and also fulfill these needs of IIT-R.”
Soota, who began his career with Shriram Group in 1965, went on to serve as the president of Wipro before co-founding Mindtree in 1999 with nine former Wipro employees. He was awarded the Electronics Man of the Year by the Electronic Component Industries Association (ELCINA) in 1992. Bengaluru-based Happiest Minds Technologies, which Soota co-founded in 2011, is a digital transformation and product engineering services company with operations in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, and Singapore.