Narayanan M. Komerath, PhD
Narayanan Komerath, PhD, is the Chair of the Taksha Alliance for a Space Economy (TASE) and of its terrestrial division Taksha Center for Smart Village Initiative (TCSVI), which uses the principles of ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization). He also chairs the Taksha Kalpana Chawla Education Center (TKCEC) and is a member of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) of the Taksha Indic Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization (TISSC) Center.
Dr. Komerath has a B.Tech (Aeronautics) from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai, India, and an MSAE and PhD in AE from the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT), Atlanta. He has served as an AIAA Associate Fellow, a Sam Nunn Senior Security Fellow, a 2004 Boeing Welliver Fellow, and has held Hessburgh and Woodruff Teaching Fellowships. He also served as a NIAC (NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts) Fellow, exploring Force Field Tailoring for Space-Based Construction (Phases 1 and 2). His Space Power Grid architecture opens an evolutionary, economically viable “InCA” Intensified Thermal Conversion Architecture for Space Solar Power.
Komerath chaired ASEE’s Aerospace Executive Committee in 2009 and the AHS Aerodynamics Technical Committee in 2014. He also served on AIAA’s Economics Technical Committee and on the founding panel of the 8th Continent Chamber of Commerce Project at the Colorado School of Mines. His student teams conducted three years of flight tests on Acoustic Shaping in the NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, and three years in the “NASA Means Business” strategic planning exercises towards a Space Economy. His research team was part of the Georgia Tech Center of Excellence in Rotary Wing Aircraft Technology since its 1982 inception (when he joined as a Post-Doctoral Fellow), until his retirement as Professor at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech at the end of 2019. He has five US Patents and over 450 publications, more than 200 of which were peer-reviewed.
At GIT, Komerath guided 21 PhDs, 75 MS students, and more than 250 undergraduate researchers. He directed the John J. Harper wind tunnel from 1990 through 2019, augmenting experimental aerodynamics into an Advanced Concepts Group and cross-disciplinary learning environment. He conducted projects sponsored by the US Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, NSF, DOE, and numerous commercial entities. He proposed and directed GIT’s first “FAST” NSF CSEMS scholarship program twice (2000-2009) and the NASA ILI project “EXTROVERT” on cross-discipline innovation (2009-2013). He won the 2015 ASEE/AIAA John Leland Atwood Award. Four of his students won the GIT Sigma Xi PhD Thesis Award (top 1%); seven more won AE nominations (top 10%). Other awards include 14 Vertical Flight Foundation Fellowships and the Goddard Space Fellowship, and one of the first NIAC student fellowships.
His most recent patents are on the Glitter Belt concept of high-altitude reflectors to reduce atmospheric heating. He organized the first Smart Village Roadmap conference on Energy Independence in 2017, and the 1st Abdul Kalam Conference on Sustainable Growth at Sustainable Cost in 2019.
Related Links
For Dr. Komerath’s full CV, click https://taksha.org/storage/2021/02/nkCV1pageFeb2021.pdf .
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=x9JocrMAAAAJ
Publications by Komerath
Komerath, Narayanan M. and Deepak, Ravi (2023): : “A Reversible Mid-Stratospheric Architecture to Reduce Insolation,” (to be published Oct. 23 in Applied Energy Journal). See Press Release at: https://conta.cc/47bjGrp or on this website by clicking here.
Related to WAVES2020, the 14th International Conference of the World Association for Vedic Studies 2020 (https://wavesinternational.net
Komerath, Narayanan M. (2020): “A Technology Countdown Approach To Historical Timelines,” modified paper originally presented at WAVES2020. Available at: https://taksha.org/wp-
For a list of additional selected publications by Narayanan Komerath, see Selected Publications by N. Komerath (https://taksha.org/storage/2021/04/SpacePublications.pdf)
