Kailasnath Purushothaman (GRD ‘93) is an aerospace and mechanical engineer whose research focuses on medical applications. His projects have included predicting patients’ tolerance to carotid sacrifice, examining the rupture probability of cerebral aneurysms, using radiotracer kinetics to study myocardial blood flow patterns, and evaluating outcomes in external beam radiotherapy of prostate cancer. The broad theme is combining engineering models and statistical physics. Kailasís interest in teaching was sparked while he was a student at the Indian Institute Technology-Kanpur and later at the Indian Institute of Science.
While a graduate student here he was a Residential College Mathematics and Science Tutor, and he subsequently taught in Mechanical Engineering at Yale for 20 years. He has been active in the Science Technology and Research Scholars Program since 1995, and has supervised the Residential College Mathematics and Science Tutoring program starting 1996. For the Poorvu Center, he supervises most tutoring in mathematics and science, including the Course-Based Peer Tutoring, the Residential College Mathematics and Science Tutoring, and the Science and Quantitative Reasoning Tutoring programs. Thus, working with the center is an important evolution of his prior experience.