Dr. Akila Muthuramalingam

Principal, KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore

Dr. Akila Muthuramalingam is a machine learning researcher, an institution builder and a leader with rare experience across academia, industry and enterprise. At the helm of an autonomous institution of over 6,800+ students across 14 undergraduate and 7 postgraduate programmes, she is guided by a conviction that has shaped her for three decades: that an engineering college exists to create not just employable graduates, but capable, confident and compassionate future citizens of India.

She is, first, a scholar of standing in the field that now defines the future of engineering. Dr. Akila has worked in machine intelligence since long before it became the technology of the moment. Her doctoral research at Anna University pioneered the use of evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms in keystroke dynamics, the science of recognising a person by their typing rhythm, and her review of biometric authentication in Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier) remains a widely cited reference in behavioural biometrics. As the field matured into deep learning, so did her work: her group has published deep learning models for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in IEEE Access, hybrid neural networks for brain tumour detection, intelligent pest detection systems for agriculture, and predictive maintenance for Industry 4.0, and she is a co-author of Quantum Machine Learning: A Modern Approach (CRC Press, 2024). With 47 publications, more than 1,200 citations, 8 patents and 5 Ph.D. scholars guided to their doctorates, all in machine learning and its applications, she reviews for journals such as Neurocomputing and IET Biometrics. For the faculty who work with her, this matters deeply: research at KPRIET is led by someone who has lived the researcher's life, who reads the field's journals as a peer, and who knows precisely what young faculty need, in time, funding and mentorship, because she once needed it herself. It is why she has steered 120 research proposals across 13 national funding agencies and brought more than Rs. 13 crore in grants and funding to the institution.

Her academic leadership converts that scholarship into outcomes students and parents can see. Under her leadership between 2019 and 2023, KPRIET rose through the NIRF engineering rankings from the 300 band in 2021 to 151-200 in 2022 and 101-150 in 2023, earned the QS I-GAUGE Diamond rating with a score of 1115, was certified as a Great Place to Work, and completed national skill certification of more than 250 faculty members and 2,800 students in a single initiative, among the largest such drives in the country. She founded and heads the institution's Centre for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems and has taught deep learning, neural networks and evolutionary computing to a generation of engineers. Today she is leading the design of an AI-era curriculum across every programme, designed by a leader who researches these technologies herself, so that each student who graduates from KPRIET steps into the industry already fluent in the tools that will shape their careers.

Her deepest imprint, though, is on how students grow. Dr. Akila believes that engineers are formed as much beyond the curriculum as within it, and under her leadership the campus's clubs and professional societies are kept deliberately vibrant, as spaces where students organise, lead and discover themselves. She is a firm believer in student profiling, in understanding each student's strengths and aspirations from the very first year, and in 2026 she introduced ten new initiatives that build every student's resume semester by semester. By design, students gain structured experience in skilling, entrepreneurship and higher studies awareness before they reach their third year, so that in the final years each one chooses their path, placement, research, enterprise or study abroad, from experience rather than guesswork. The same philosophy runs through the postgraduate programmes.

What makes her leadership distinctive, however, is that it is not confined to the campus. Dr. Akila has served as chief executive of a large group of educational institutions, signing 20 MoUs with industries and foreign universities, and spent two years as a startup co-founder, registering three companies and building ventures in India and Europe, an experience deepened by executive certification in Strategic Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Tiruchirappalli. She has sat on both sides of the placement table: as the academic preparing students for industry, and as the entrepreneur deciding whom to hire. That business acumen shows in how she runs the institution, in industry partnerships that lead to real placements, in budgets that are directed to laboratories and student development, and in a strategic roadmap to establish KPRIET as a research institution by 2030-31.

Beneath all of it is a teacher's heart. Dr. Akila began in the classroom, and students remain the reason she leads. She believes an institution must care for the whole young person, their character, wellbeing and values, as attentively as it trains their minds. It was this conviction that led her, in 2024, to mobilise a campaign that set a world record for the most digital pledges against drug abuse in 48 hours, rallying thousands of young people to protect their own futures. Parents who entrust their children to KPRIET will find at its helm a leader recognised among the Top 10 Women Leaders in Education in India, a recipient of the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Lifetime Achievement National Award, the AICTE Lilavathi Award and the Tamil Nadu Women Achievers Award, and, above these honours, an educator who knows that every student on her campus is somebody's dream, and treats that trust as the most important responsibility of her office.

Dr. Akila received her B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from Madurai Kamaraj University, her M.E. with Distinction as a University Rank holder from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, and her Ph.D. from Anna University. She is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers (India), a member of the Education Panel of CII Coimbatore and a TEDx speaker.