Prof. (Dr.) Pranab K. Dan

Prof. (Dr.) Pranab K. Dan, is now serving as Pro-Vice Chancellor (Accreditation, Research & Advanced Studies) and Professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the Seacom Skills University, Bolpur, after his tenure in the School of Engineering Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.

He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from IIEST, Shibpur and Ph.D. in Production Engineering from Jadavpur University.

He has been the Founding-Head of the Industrial Engineering & Management Department at the West Bengal University of Technology. Before joining academics, he held senior positions in renowned national and multinational industrial organizations.

His teaching and research interests encompass Product Engineering, Innovation & Design Thinking, Emerging Technology & Entrepreneurship and EV & Ecodesign.

He has published more than hundred research articles in journals, conferences and book-chapters and has supervised several Ph.Ds. He is the Advisor-Mentor of a number of start-up companies and served as the Chairman of the Entrepreneurship Cell at IIT Kharagpur for a decade.

Prof. Dan has been the Principal and Co-Principal Investigator of sponsored projects, including the prestigious ‘National Initiative for Design Innovation’ sponsored by MHRD, Govt. of India.

He has travelled across the country and abroad to deliver talks and presentations on the referred subject matter. Prof. Dan consulted a number of companies and conducted training programmes for corporate organisations.

He is a Fellow Member of the Institute of Engineers, India. Prof. Dan has been on the technical committees of renowned national and international conferences like ICoRD, AIMTDR, ICITM (UK), IDEAS and chaired technical sessions in several others.

He served as a PG Curricula Review Committee member at IIT Kharagpur and launched NPTEL Course on ‘Product Engineering and Design Thinking’ to build competency in innovation domain, as well as spearheaded FDP on Industry 4.0 at his current organization.

He is a mentor for ‘Capacity Building for Design and Entrepreneurship’ programme under the aegis of ‘Malaviya Mission Teacher Training Programme’ launched by the Ministry of Education, Govt. of India, for a National Institute of Technology and served as an expert in developing curricula for ‘Entrepreneurship & Management’ at IIT Jodhpur for inclusion in B.Tech programmes and taught ‘Entrepreneurial Management’ as a guest faculty.

Prof. Dan has been associated with CII for the past two decades and with the VDMA (German Engineering Federation). He was an official Innovation Ambassador to other institutions and led the multi-institutional presentation at the ‘Rashtrapati Bhavan’ during the Festival of Innovation representing IIT Kharagpur.

Prof. (Dr.) Milan Rackov

Prof. (Dr.) Milan Rackov is a full professor of the Department of Mechanization and Machine Design at the Faculty of Technical Sciences at the University of Novi Sad. He received his Ph.D. degree in the Faculty of Technical Sciences at the University of Novi Sad in 2013. In 2014, he finished his second Ph.D. thesis and received the second Ph.D. degree in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava.

His research areas include machine elements and machine design, mechanical power transmission, helical gear reducers, rolling bearings, 3D modeling, rapid prototyping. Milan Rackov is the author/co-author of many papers published in conference proceedings and scientific journals (in total, more than 160 papers). He has authored 16 papers in high international scientific journals, 75 papers in proceedings of international conferences, 5 chapters in monographs and 10 university textbooks.

Prof. Rackov is the chief of the Chair for machine elements, theory of machines and mechanisms. He is the visiting professor of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Lublin in Poland. He is the main coordinator of the CEEPUS network RS-0304 - Technical Characteristics Researching of Modern Products in Machine Industry with the Purpose of Improvement Their Market Characteristics and Better Placement on the Market, and the local coordinator for three other CEEPUS networks. He is the organizer of the International Conference KOD – Machine and Industrial Design in Mechanical Engineering.