About Patcha Ramachandra Rao
Patcha Ramachandra Rao was a metallurgist and administrator. He has the unique distinction of being the only vice-chancellor (2002–05) of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) who was also a student (1963–68) and faculty (1964–92) at that institution. From 1992 to 2002, Rao was the director of the National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur. After his tenure as vice-chancellor of B.H.U., in 2005, he took the reins of the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (DIAT) as its first vice-chancellor. He was to serve DIAT until his superannuation in 2007. From 2007 till the end, Rao was a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials, in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Rao pioneered research activities in the area of rapid solidification, an area pertaining to the solidification of liquids at the rate of a million degrees per second, in India in the mid-1960s. Rao discovered novel intermetallic phases and also the hitherto unexpected phases with 5-fold rotational symmetry.
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