Penn State Behrend
    School of Engineering
    5101 Jordan Road
    Erie, PA  16563-1701

    Office: REDC 161
    Phone: (814) 898-6472
    Fax: (814) 898-6125
    Email: srn3@psu.edu

Sudarshan R. Nelatury
Research

Research projects completed 

Krahe, R. [Principal Investigator], Loker, D. [Co-investigator], and Nelatury, S. [Co-investigator], MDEM Modeling, Eriez Magnetics, $13,378, October 2004-November 2005.

Research statement

Every good teacher must engage in some form of research in the discipline that he teaches in order to maintain currency and relevancy. Otherwise, teaching can become a monotonous and dull endeavor. Good teaching and research complement each other in a symbiotic manner.

I strongly believe in team spirit and an amicable collaboration in research. Over the past few years at the Behrend College, I have maintained close ties with colleagues in my program and a few friends in other schools. For example, I worked on a small grant from Eriez Magnetics and developed a metal detector program with my senior colleague, Ron Krahe. This is now being used in the industry and is known to provide satisfactory results.

Several research labs and research groups in bigger schools usually focus on highly specialized topics often referred by their sponsors and funding sources. The deliverables are beneficial to industries and defense agencies. I believe that research need not be thought of as solely their cup of tea.  I have verified during my years here that the expectations of Penn State University are realistic and wholesome. Since the key deliverables in the teaching profession are students who are audacious enough to think aloud in unconventional terms, every teacher must thus be ready to choose, pursue, and if need be, modify research directions with the objective of helping the students. The research a common professor could do may be as small as a grain of mustard seed; suffice it would, if it has life in it to produce another seed-bearing tree. Part of it could involve making instructional aids for faculty and students. The solution manual I co-authored for a textbook on Electromagnetics containing almost 797 problems just released by Oxford University Press and two book chapters (CRC Press) amply exemplify this.

I also believe that, while it is fairly easy to find solutions to a problem in an emerging field, we need to muster extra boldness to find blank lines among the folded pages of scientific discovery and to extend an idea known for 50-100 years. In digital filter design, the 50 year old impulse invariance technique is known to cause aliasing error and admittedly, hitherto it could never be used for high-pass or band-stop filter design leaving a big hole. Starting with a simple RC circuit, by proposing a pre-warping technique, I have filled this for good – aliasing error in impulse invariance design can be reduced now and unrealizable filters can be realized now! This paper, which broke new ground, is due to appear soon in Digital Signal Processing (Elsevier). Overall, the research I have been doing is slightly different from that of sponsored projects. Much of it is based on ideas emanated from my teaching. As such, my publications are in areas as diverse as Signal processing, Global optimization, Power sources, Green’s functions, Electromagnetics, Meta-materials, Plasma Science, Complex media, Optics and Nano-photonics. Many of them have a very familiar theme involving simple apparatus (as may be noted in my publications).

Most importantly, I maintain that one individual may not be able to conduct research alone, but when one gathers help from other resourceful personalities, a significant progress can be made. With this conviction, I seek every form of help from senior faculty from schools far and wide. A definite positive attitude coupled with a strong belief in Penn State’s research standards has thus produced good results for me, with the number of my publications reaching 45.