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Dr. Venkat Selvamanickam is a M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, the Director of the Advanced Manufacturing Institute and the Director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity Applied Research Hub. Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer of SuperPower Inc, a former subsidiary of Philips Electronics. He led SuperPower to multiple world-records for the highest performance thin film high temperature superconductor (HTS) wire over several length scales, the longest thin film HTS wire made and first to pilot manufacturing. He led the world’s first significant delivery of thin film superconductor wire to build a power transmission cable in Albany, NY, which is the world’s first demonstration of a thin film superconductor device in the power grid.

At the University of Houston, Prof. Selvamanickam led a highly successful Department of Energy-funded program to achieve four-fold improvement in in-field performance of superconductor wires. He has also established research on epitaxial thin film semiconductors on low-cost, flexible substrates for photovoltaics and flexible electronics. Prof. Selvamanickam has published over 268 papers and holds over 48 issued U.S. patents and over 75 issued international patents. He is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House, which is the highest award given to scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. He has also received three R&D 100 awards, the Superconductor Industry Person of the Year award, Wire and Cable Technology International Award and the IEEE Dr. James Wong Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions to Applied Superconductivity Materials Technology. Prof. Selvamanickam is a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors and IEEE. In the last nine years, Prof. Selvamanickam acquired $28.1M funding from DOE, NIST, ARL, NSF, ONR, industry and the state of Texas, $25M of which is credited to him. His cumulative research funding ranks among the top three at UH in the last ten years.

Prof. Selvamanickam founded a national consortium, Advanced Superconductor Manufacturing Institute (ASMI), now a 501c(3) organization to support U.S. industries to commercialize superconductor technologies. Prof. Selvamanickam is also the founder of a small business, AMPeers. AMPeers recently received Phase 2 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) funding of $1M from the U.S. Department of Energy for a project to scale up a novel superconductor wire technology developed at UH to manufacturing. Prof. Selvamanickam is the founding Director of a University-wide center, Advanced Manufacturing Institute with a mission to function as a central manufacturing research organization of the University of Houston so that a wide range of technologies being developed by UH faculty can be scaled up to manufacturing and eventual commercialization. He will also be the Director of the new M.S. in Manufacturing program that is pending approval at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.