Shanker Balasubramaniam

Shanker Balasubramaniam (born April 18, 1967), also known by his publication name B. Shanker, is an Indian-American electrical engineer and academic specializing in computational electromagnetics. He is the Elizabeth and John Tinkham Endowed Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ohio State University.^[1][2] He is a Fellow of the IEEE, elected in 2010 for his contributions to time and frequency domain computational electromagnetics.^[3][4]

Balasubramaniam got his Bachelor of Technology degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1989.^[3] He got both Master of Science (1992) and Ph.D. (1993) degrees in engineering science and mechanics from Pennsylvania State University. His doctoral dissertation, "Extended Maxwell Garnett formalism for homogenizing chiral-in-chiral composites," was supervised by Akhlesh Lakhtakia.^[5]

From 1993 to 1996, Balasubramaniam was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Iowa State University, where he worked on the molecular theory of optical activity.^[3] He then served as a visiting assistant professor at the Center for Computational Electromagnetics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1996 to 1999.^[3] From 1999 to 2002, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University.^[6]

Balasubramaniam joined Michigan State University as an associate professor in 2002 and was promoted to full professor in 2008.^[6] In 2017, he was named University Distinguished Professor, an honor accorded to approximately 2% of tenure-system faculty at MSU.^[7][8] He held joint appointments in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering.^[6]

During his time at MSU, Balasubramaniam served in several administrative roles, including Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (2012–2015), Associate Chair of the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering (2015–2018), and Associate Chair for Research in ECE (2019–2022).^[3]

In August 2022, Balasubramaniam became Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ohio State University.^[1] In 2023, he was appointed to the Elizabeth and John Tinkham Endowed Professorship in Engineering.^[2]

Balasubramaniam's research focuses on computational electromagnetics, including frequency and time domain integral equation methods, multi-scale fast multipole methods, fast transient methods, and higher order finite element and integral equation methods.^[3] His work also encompasses electromagnetic wave propagation in complex media, mesoscale electromagnetics, and particle and molecular dynamics applied to multiphysics and multiscale problems.^[3]

He has developed algorithms for solving Maxwell's equations across multiple scales, with applications to large-scale scattering, antenna design, optics, electromagnetic compatibility, coupled fullwave-circuit analysis, molecular dynamics, surface plasmons, micro-bubbles, and quantum dots.^[1]

• IEEE Fellow (2010), "for contributions to time and frequency domain computational electromagnetics"^[3]
• William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award, Michigan State University (2014)^[9]
• University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University (2017)^[7]
• Elizabeth and John Tinkham Endowed Professor in Engineering, Ohio State University (2023)^[2]

Balasubramaniam has served as an associate editor for IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters and IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, and as a topical editor for the Journal of the Optical Society of America: A.^[3] He is a full member of the United States National Committee for the International Union of Radio Science (USNC-URSI) Commission B.^[3]