Chandrashekhar Joshi, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been appointed the inaugural holder of the Mukund Padmanabhan Term Chair in Excellence.
Known for his creativity in experimental plasma physics during his four-decade career at UCLA, Joshi championed the groundbreaking development of plasma-based accelerators — a technology that uses ionized gas, or plasma, to rapidly accelerate electrons and positrons to extremely high speeds, thereby creating very high-energy particle beams in extremely small spaces. The high-energy particle accelerator, widely considered one of the most important scientific tools of the 20th century, is expected to help researchers tackle some of society’s most pressing challenges.
Building on his groundbreaking work in plasma physics in the 1980s, Joshi developed additional advances and trained new generations of scientists who now lead the field. He leads UCLA’s Plasma Accelerator Group, which studies how plasmas can be used in future high-energy accelerators.
The endowed chair is one of two term chairs established in 2024, each funded with a $500,000 gift from Mukund Padmanabhan, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in electric engineering from UCLA Samueli. The two endowed chairs are matched with an additional $1 million from the Samueli Foundation.
