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Dr. Venkat Selvamanickam is a M.D. Anderson Chair in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston and serves as Director of the Advanced Manufacturing Institute (AMI). His research is focused on advanced manufacturing, superconducting materials, and energy technologies.
Prior to joining the University of Houston, Dr. Selvamanickam was the Chief Technology Officer of SuperPower Inc., a former subsidiary of Philips Electronics. During his tenure, he led the development of world-record-performance thin-film high-temperature superconductor (HTS) wires, including the longest thin-film HTS wires ever produced and the first pilot-scale manufacturing of HTS wire. He also led the world’s first commercial delivery of thin-film superconductor wire for a power transmission cable in Albany, New York, marking the first demonstration of a superconducting device on the electric power grid.
At the University of Houston, Dr. Selvamanickam has led highly successful Department of Energy–funded programs, achieving a four-fold improvement in the in-field performance of superconducting wires and scaling up this technology to pilot-scale manufacturing. His research portfolio also includes epitaxial thin-film semiconductors on low-cost, flexible substrates for applications in photovoltaics and flexible electronics and metal additive manufacturing.
Dr. Selvamanickam has published over 330 peer-reviewed papers and holds 70 issued U.S. patents and more than 100 issued international patents. His honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House, three R&D 100 Awards, the Superconductor Industry Person of the Year Award, the Wire and Cable Technology International Award, and the IEEE Dr. James Wong Award for Continuing and Significant contributions to applied superconductivity materials technology. He is a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors and IEEE.
At UH, Dr. Selvamanickam has secured over $50 million in research funding from federal agencies, industry, and the state of Texas, with $43 million directly credited to him. His cumulative research funding ranked among the top three at the University of Houston over a ten-year period.
Dr. Selvamanickam is the founder of the Advanced Superconductor Manufacturing Institute (ASMI), a national 501(c)(3) consortium supporting U.S. industry in the commercialization of superconductor technologies. He also founded AMPeers, a small business that has received over $10 million in SBIR funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Navy to scale superconducting wire technologies developed at UH to manufacturing.
In addition, he is the founding Director of UH’s Advanced Manufacturing Institute, a university-wide center dedicated to scaling laboratory innovations to pilot manufacturing and commercialization across a broad range of technologies.