Jayanat Baliga
Jayanat Baliga, an Indian American scientist has been awarded Russia’s top technology award in honor of his work in energy efficiency. Baliga is being recognized as the inventor of the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), which he developed while working at the General Electrical research & development center in New York state in 1983. The IGBT switches energy hundreds of thousands of times a second, raising the efficiency of any equipment manifold, according to the Indo-Asian News Service. The technology Baliga created brought about a revolution in energy management and significant savings in terms of both money and resources. Baliga earned his Bachelor’s in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras in 1969 before arriving in the United States, where he earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.