BHU America Foundation

BHU America Foundation (BHUAF) is a charitable organization registered in the USA. Its charter is to support Banaras Hindu University (BHU) through philanthropic financial contributions from USA-based well-wishers.


The objective of BHUAF is to promote education and research among BHU’s students and faculty by supporting students and faculty. Scholarships will be created to encourage deserving students. It will provide funds to faculty for their research, teaching, and professional growth, and building research labs. It will support collaboration and research between faculty and students of BHU and educational and research organizations in the USA and elsewhere. BHU also aims to promote and facilitate research projects between BHU faculty and industrial organizations in the USA.

BHUAF is registered as a 501 (c) (3) organization in the USA and donations made to BHUAF are tax-deductible for US Federal and state tax purposes to the full extent of the law. Please click on the links below to view/download BHUAF’s governance documents: 

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Board of Directors

Ravindra Verma
Ravindra Verma, PhD | President

Ravindra Verma  has actively contributed during his 30+ years of professional career towards the development, financing, execution and management of public-private partnerships (P3) for integrated, sustainable and intelligent multi-modal transportation and logistics infrastructure - including highways, bridges, tunnels, mass-transit, freight rail, multi-modal logistics hubs, ports & airports. In 2000, Dr. Verma founded the global Mobility Infrastructure Group (MiG), and over the past 20+ years, he and MiG have successfully participated in global fund raising, deployment and management of US $10+ billion capital focused in transport infrastructure programs across California, India and South East Asia.

Ravindra has played a key role over the past three decades promoting a strong Indo-American collaboration in the fields of transport infrastructure development, infrastructure finance, private equity, venture capital, as well as transfer of technology with focus on delivering major programs. This has included major transportation infrastructure programs in India – namely the Delhi Metro, Delhi Airport, Kolkata Metro and Kolkata Airport. Dr. Verma led the original transportation infrastructure task force as part of the USA-India CEO Forum, which was jointly formed and tasked by the President of USA & the Prime Minister of India, during the USA President’s landmark visit to New Delhi in March 2006. He continues to play an active role as part of the USA-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) with focus on transportation & logistics infrastructure sectors.

Ravindra’s recent accomplishment in the P3 transport infrastructure arena has been to serve on a continuing basis from inception for the past 15+ years as the Co-Founder & Managing Director for the Second Vivekananda Bridge (SVB) Tollway, a modern 6-kms long 6-lane US $200+ million bridge tollway on NH-19 (old NH-2) across the river Hooghly near Kolkata in eastern India. The SVB Tollway is India’s oldest & largest privately financed toll bridge on a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) basis, and is an emblem of Indo-American collaboration. The landmark asset has completed 15 years of successful commercial operations with another 10+ years remaining in the concession. SVBTC has secured a stable AA+ Rating from CRISIL (S&P) on a continuing basis. Upon completion in 2007, SVBTC pioneered the first-ever use of extradosed cable-stayed bridge technology in India, established two world records and won the prestigious American Segmental Bridge Institute (ASBI) Award of Excellence. 

In his engineering and construction career, Ravindra actively contributed towards the development of earthquake resistant reinforced concrete (RC) bridges. His doctoral work under late Professor M. J. Nigel Priestley at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) was part of a major pioneering bridge seismic retrofit program jointly sponsored by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). This work led to the implementation of full-height steel jacketing of squat RC piers across several thousand bridges in California. Dr. Verma served as the Technical Director for the award-winning seismic retrofit of the 1.85 miles (2.96-kms) long six-lane San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in the San Francisco bay area. Ravindra has authored and published over 20 articles in journals, workshops and conferences on seismic design of reinforced concrete bridges. He has worked in his initial career with some of the largest USA based global infrastructure conglomerates, namely, CRSS, C&B-Jacobs, Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) & AECOM.

Education
Ph.D., Structural Engineering, 1993, University of California, San Diego; California, USA
M.S., Structural Engineering, 1990, University of California, San Diego; California, USA
B.Tech., Civil Engineering, 1988, Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, India
Member, Advisory Board, Jacobs School of Engineering, UCSD, La Jolla, CA, USA 



Shyam Sunder, PhD | Secretary

Shyam Sunder is the James L. Frank Professor Emeritus of Accounting, Economics and Finance at the Yale School of Management and Department of Economics. Educated as an engineer at IIT Kharagpur and Indian Railways’ school at Jamalpur, he received his M.S. and PhD degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. He served as a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University, and as a visiting professor at California Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), Kobe and Keio Universities (Japan) and others. His research includes role of information in stock markets, statistical theory of valuation, social norms, standards, and regulation of financial reporting, experimental finance and experimental macro-economics and introduction of the concept of zero-intelligence agents. His writings include ten books and more than 230 articles in the leading scholarly journals of accounting, economics, and finance, as well as in popular media. His books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. He has been an invited speaker at more than 500 universities on all continents and has been awarded many honors. He served as elected president of the American Accounting Association and founded Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium. His research is available at:

https://faculty.som.yale.edu/shyamsunder/research

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Arvind Jain


Arvind Jain, PhD | Treasurer

Arvind Jain, a passionate supporter of education in India and USA, has been at the forefront of the IIT alumni movement in the USA since the 1980’s. He is a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and was also amongst the first recipients of IIT Kharagpur’s Distinguished Service Award. He currently serves on the Boards of the IIT Kharagpur Foundation and IIT Gandhinagar Foundation in the USA and is a past President of both foundations. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Pan-IIT USA and the Board of Trustees of Northern Light School in Oakland, California.

Arvind obtained his B.Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur and won the B.C. Roy Gold Medal as the best all-round undergraduate student in 1969. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Operations Research from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. His doctoral work centered on an innovative approach to solving large-scale nonlinear optimization programs.

Arvind initially worked at the Energy Modeling Group at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and then transitioned to the aluminum industry. As Vice-President Corporate Development at Canadian aluminum producer Alcan, he played a key role in the consolidation of the Western world aluminum industry, establishing himself as an internationally recognized authority on aluminum. Since 2013 he has been Managing Partner at aluminum consultancy AXJ Resources.

In early 2020, Arvind and his IIT Kharagpur batchmate, Prabjit Singh, created an online forum hosting a weekly Zoom meeting of IIT Kharagpur alumni. This platform has reconnected alumni, often after a lapse of over 50 years, created new friendships and brought alumni, their teachers, and their Alma Mater closer than ever before.

Recently, inspired by the idea of giving back, Arvind and his wife Renu have established a Faculty Chair at IIT Kharagpur’s School of Medical Science & Technology. 

Raj Mashruwala


Raj Mashruwala | Member

Raj Mashruwala served on the boards of Syntel (SYNT, acquired by Atos), Delta ID, Inc. (acquired by FING-B.ST), Guavus, Inc. (acquired by Thales), and Healthifyme. He is an Emeritus Partner in Prime Venture Partners, India focused early-stage venture fund. He is actively engaged with non-profits where he serves on the Boards of Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation, Foundation of Center for Healthcare Entrepreneurship (CfHE), and IIT Gandhinagar Foundation.

Mr. Mashruwala retired from TIBCO Software Inc (acquired by Vista Equity Partners) as an Executive Vice President in the CEO office. Before that, he was the Chief Operating Officer at TIBCO Software Inc. Since the founding of TIBCO, Mashruwala built and led worldwide sales and marketing operations. As the Chief Operating Office, Mashruwala was also responsible for engineering, professional, and support services.

Before joining TIBCO, Mr. Mashruwala co-founded YieldUp International, a semi-conductor equipment manufacturing company, Media Computer Technology Inc., an ASIC design house, and Consilium Inc., a Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) software provider. He has led Consilium’s R&D and professional services operations since the company’s inception.

Mr. Mashruwala has a Master of Science (Engineering) from the University of California, Berkeley (1976) and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1975). He holds several patents on Object-Oriented Modeling for Manufacturing Systems.

Community Service:
• Chair, IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation, Santa Clara, California
• Director, IIT Gandhinagar Foundation, Palo Alto, California
• Director, Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), Palo Alto, California
• Director, Foundation of Center for Healthcare Entrepreneurship, IITH, Hyderabad
• Chief Biometric Coordinator (2009-2011), Aadhaar. Mr. Mashruwala has been an early volunteer in this ambitious nation-building project of the Indian Government.  

Sunder Ramamurthy


Sundar Ramamurthy, PhD | Member

Sundar Ramamurthy, Group Vice President, General Manager

Applied Materials, Inc. is a 25+ year veteran in the semiconductor industry. At Applied Materials, he is responsible for advanced packaging, specialty semiconductors and epitaxy businesses. He leads an integrated team across the enterprise to fuel some of the fastest growing markets in this industry. Sundar holds a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Technology degree in metallurgical engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University. He has authored or co-authored over 30 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and has more than 30 patents granted or pending. Sundar also serves in the External Advisory Board for the department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota and is an active mentor at the Miller Center in Santa Clara University for accelerating social enterprises. 

Donate to BHU America Foundation

BHU America Foundation welcomes donations from well wishers across the world. Donation made in the US are generally tax deductible to the extent permissible by law. Please consult your accountant for your specific situation. 

Donate to BHU America Foundation



The funds thus raised are used towards promoting excellence at BHU - in research and teaching, supporting faculty, students and staff, and enhancing BHU infrastructure.

Governance

Governance records can be viewed/downloaded here.

US IRS Determination Letter

BHU America Foundation

Contacts

+1 (925) 353-8781
BHU America Foundation
5667 SUNSET CREEK CT
PLEASANTON, CA 94566 
donate@bhuaf.org

About BHU

Banaras Hindu University is an internationally reputed center of learning, situated in the holy city of Varanasi. This creative and innovative university was founded by the great nationalist leader, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, in 1916 with cooperation of eminent personalities like Dr Annie Besant, who viewed BHU as the University of India.

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