Soon after the Apollo missions returned to earth, the United States parceled pieces of moonrock to countries around the globe as a gesture of goodwill. By chance or by fate, some of those pieces landed at a consulate in India, where a nine-year-old Sethuraman Panchanathan marveled at them with his father, an astrophysicist and professor.
Today, Dr. Panchanathan is best known as the 15th director of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan
“Making things possible” could very well be a motto of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds approximately 25% of all federally supported research at U.S. colleges and universities. In fact, the foundation is the major source of federal backing in fields such as mathematics, computer science, economics and social sciences.
Appointed by former President Donald Trump to lead the $8.5 billion independent federal agency in 2019, Panchanathan was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in June 2020 — a particularly heated month amid a year marked by an ongoing pandemic, racial strife and distrust of public and scientific authorities.
Yet, despite taking on the position during a tumultuous era, Panchanathan still speaks with the same optimism toward science that he describes having as a child. It’s through science, he insists, that we can unlock solutions to major issues confronting humanity.
That belief has been the impetus behind his own research at Arizona State University (ASU), where he is a tenured professor — currently on extended leave for his six-year term at NSF — and has held various leadership positions within the past two decades. With a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering, Panchanathan has devoted much of his time to exploring how machines can help people with disabilities, specifically those who are visually impaired.
