As a boy in India, Anil Rajvanshi often found himself at the train station intently observing locomotives and dreaming.
“I just would stand in front of this huge steam engine and be mesmerized,” recalled Rajvanshi, Ph.D. “I thought that the best thing in the world would be an engine driver. And then I found this guy carrying a can of oil and he was lubricating the pistons. So I thought he was even better than the driver.”
Like many children destined for engineering, he would take things apart in the house and put them back together again. Often.
“Right from the beginning, I was very fascinated by engineering,” he said.
These days, the 1979 University of Florida mechanical engineering graduate has merged his fascination with the mechanical with the demands of sustainable energy. After a short teaching stint at UF after graduation, he declined lucrative job offers in the United States and returned to India with an eye on making a difference.
Read more about his journey as a distinguished UF MAE alumnus and global innovator in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and rural technology in the full story by Dave Schlenker for Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering