‘Missile Woman of India’ and Director of Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL) Tessy Thomas was presented the Dr Pinnamaneni and Smt. Seethadevi Foundation award here on Saturday. Foundation Managing Trustee C Nageswara Rao and trust member and daughter of Pinnamaneni Venkateswara Rao after whom the awarded is named, Ch Sudha, presented the award.
The Missile Woman now shares the award with distinguished scientists like A.P.J.Abdul Kalam— who was also her mentor, M.S.Swaminathan and Prof C.N.R. Rao.
Prof V Ramalingaswami and Sribhashyam Appalacharyalu were the first to be conferred the award in 1989. The other eminent persons who received the award include V Kurien, Lata Mangeshkar, S.P.Balasubramanyam, R.K Laxman, K.J.Jesudas, Karan Singh, B.G.Verghese, Ramanand Sagar, Sudha Murty, E.Sreedharan, Zakir Hussain, Y.V.Reddy and Changati Koteswara Rao.
The Gramapragathi Puraskaram was presented to the Swacha Sundara Challapalli Udyamam represented by doctor couple D R K Prasad and Padmavati.
Earlier the Missile woman spoke to the students of the V.R. Siddhartha Engineering College, Kanuru.
She asked the students to ensure a strong hold on the basics of engineering, mathematics and physics to be successful in any area.
Sharing her experiences of working along with former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on the missile technologies, she urged the students to take Abdul Kalam as their role model and work hard for the overall growth of the nation.
She stressed on the need to be skilful in the latest technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics, Internet of Things and cyber security as there were many opportunities across the nation in both public and private sectors.
Space technologies
Students were all charged up after listening to her talk and actively participated in the interaction that primarily centred around missile and space technologies.
President of the Siddhartha Academy N. Venkateswarulu, vice-president C. Nageswara Rao, Principal A.V. Ratna Prasad, CSE HoD V. Srinivasa Rao and heads of other departments M. Suneetha and PVRL Narasimham were present.
