It probably didn’t matter that it was a telescope a young Sambandamurthy Ganapathy was tasked with repairing over the course of his weekly hands-on practicum shifts at a physics lab at The American College in Madurai, India.
What mattered for the first-year student, what surprisingly and wonderfully helped illuminate an exciting academic path forward, was the process and the results.
It took weeks to order and receive parts to repair the telescopes, to work on them with a faculty mentor helping to guide Ganapathy and several other students. But eventually, it was time to try them out.
On the roof above the physics lab, Ganapathy peered through his repaired telescope and saw stars and planets—and his future.
“To be able to do something, and then you succeed and after that, you have an outcome that leaves a lasting impact—that’s one of the moments where I felt connected to doing something with my hands and seeing the results,” Ganapathy says.
In the years since his telescope eureka moment, Ganapathy went on to earn his Ph.D. in quantum materials and build a distinguished career, now into its third decade, as an academic leader, teacher, physicist and researcher focused on materials engineering.
As he was with that telescope and even as a child, Ganapathy remains a tinkerer. But his days of using screwdrivers and soldering guns have long passed. Now, his tools might include a beam of light, and his work may be with microscopic dabs of material to which he adds even smaller amounts of a different material.
That addition can dramatically alter the original material’s properties, a seismic change at an atomic level. Understanding what additions—and sometimes, subtractions—bring out which properties is critical.
“What fascinated me was materials that show very dramatic properties with very tiny changes,” he says.
As he begins as dean of the College of Engineering and Science, Ganapathy will again be exploring the impact of additions and choices.
His tenure starts with listening.
“I’m coming into a community that I know is doing really well, but I would like to listen to people and then understand what their ambitions and aspirations are,” he says. “I see the dean’s role to be someone who provides an environment that enables people to succeed—our students, our faculty, our staff, everyone.”
“My goal is to make sure that we create a positive environment by listening to people and providing an environment where they can thrive and do what they are best at doing.”
“I see the dean’s role to be someone who provides an environment that enables people to succeed.”
Sambandamurthy Ganapathy, Dean, College of Engineering and Science
A Tinkerer’s Epiphany
Sambandamurthy Ganapathy was fiddling around with things well before he engaged with that telescope as a college underclassman. Toting that proclivity to university, he opted to focus on physics. When he entered graduate school as a young physicist, Ganapathy was able to spend two months each in rotations with different research groups.
He experienced calculations and theoretical work. He built equipment during his stint as an experimental scientist. And he tried his hand at computational work in cosmology, where modeling is a key tool.
Not surprisingly, Ganapathy chose to be an experimental scientist. He was soon utilizing equipment for experiments focused on a growing aspect of his academic passion: deriving a deeper understanding of certain materials.
For example, materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance, called superconductors, show completely different properties when functioning at room temperature and at colder temperatures.
“So, those things attracted me a lot,” he says, “and that’s where I started exploring materials.”
That exploration has Ganapathy and his team seeking new materials or new functionalities from existing materials that they manipulate in some way, including via the use of tools such as light and electricity.
Adding a small amount of an impurity, such as copper, to gold could make the new, combined material malleable, ductile, even optically transparent—in other words, almost entirely different from pure gold. In theory, such changes could vastly enlarge the applications of this gold-copper mix.
“There are multiple ways you can take a material and do very simple things that would result in functionalities that we normally don’t imagine,” Ganapathy says. “We push them and then see how their properties change.”
Brain-Inspired Computing
One major change Ganapathy is pursuing could revolutionize modern computing—including artificial intelligence—while reducing the vast amounts of energy needed to power all of it.
Called neuromorphic computing, this brain-inspired approach would work by making the chips at the heart of the computing process function more like human brains, which both store and process information at the same location. (The chips will not be sentient.)
Current computing architecture does something similar but without our brain’s evolutionary elegance: There is memory; there is a processor; but data goes back and forth between them, often billions of times, as it is processed on the way to a decision or output.
These back-and-forth treks require energy—a whole lot of it when it comes to artificial intelligence—and producing that energy can be costly, financially and environmentally. So, massive amounts of these two precious commodities are expended with growing frequency as the use of AI rapidly expands.
As Ganapathy well knows, it all comes back to materials. This storage-and-process ability will not be possible without materials than can store and process data at the same space and, ideally, are also more energy efficient than the silicon-based architecture primarily in use today.
Ganapathy says we are starting to see examples of new materials working side by side with traditional technology. Faster and more energy-efficient neuromorphic materials are being added to silicon electronics to handle processes that do not require intense computing power more quickly, such as pattern recognition and instant decision-making in autonomous vehicles.
“So, we work very closely with the semiconductor and computing industries on the materials that they use, and we develop new materials that are compatible with those and can be integrated into this current architecture so we could utilize the dramatic properties of these new materials,” Ganapathy said.
Many academic leaders were researchers before growing into leadership roles, he notes, and the drive to find answers usually remains even if the title changes.
“I would like to keep that and engage in research, as well as in the service to the campus community,” he says, “making sure that my administrative duties are not overweighing my research curiosity and the other way around.”
‘Leadership Journey’
If curiosity fuels Ganapathy’s academic endeavors, collaboration has guided him as a researcher and academic leader.
These can be collaborations between people, public and private entities, university and industry, public sector and the government.
For faculty, collaboration often starts in the lab, as Ganapathy has seen with his materials research. There are chemists who grow the material and characterize it, physicists building devices out of it and electrical engineers who will develop the systems spurred by the research’s findings.
“Increasingly, the world is going into research that’s collaborative,” Ganapathy says. “And that’s what I’ve been doing as an academic leader on my leadership journey—working in very collaborative ways.”
He also sees the value and power of collaboration as an administrator.
The Space Coast can be a partnership bonanza, with space, defense, aerospace, advanced manufacturing and other key sectors represented. Coupled with what Ganapathy describes as “Florida Tech’s DNA in the space program,” that rich array of actual and potential partners was appealing as he considered the opportunity to lead the COES.
“So, I thought that the spirit of exploration and innovation that comes from an academic institution, as well as from industry in the same area—I thought that was a very attractive thing,” he says.
“I see that the future belongs to an institution that would actually bring together the talent, ideas, partnerships and opportunities for all of us. I think that’s where the institution would thrive.”
“I see that the future belongs to an institution that would actually bring together the talent, ideas, partnerships and opportunities for all of us. I think that’s where the institution would thrive.”
Sambandamurthy Ganapathy, Dean, College of Engineering and Science
Ambitious and Practical
The curiosity that fuels Ganapathy’s scholarship is welcome in his leadership role, as well. Ambition is useful, too, as it urges us toward challenges to be solved, he believes.
In leaders, however, those drives must be tempered with two notions, Ganapathy says: what is practically possible and what is impactful immediately.
“The balance is what defines good leaders in my view,” he says. “A leader has to have the balance of being ambitious, as well as practical.”
Put another way, the balance is about tackling far-ranging challenges and more immediate ones, but not losing sight of strengthening and evolving the systems that make the college and university successful.
“Be curious, be ambitious, and be practical in achieving those ambitions, so that we build structures and research and education programs that are enduring and sustainable,” Ganapathy says.
Ganapathy sees his role as dean as providing an environment that enables the “extremely talented people” on campus to succeed, whether students, faculty or staff.
“At the end of the day, the dean’s role or provost or any one of those academic leadership roles—we are service roles, right? We serve the institution; we serve the faculty; we serve our students; we serve our community partners; and alumni and our staff,” he says.
“So, as a service, we need to be as accessible and transparent, and also as communicative, as we can. And when we achieve all of that, I think, we would take the institution forward, both in research as well as in the leadership.”
He concludes, “The ideal goal is to make sure that our students, when they graduate, are successful.”
Building Community
This is Ganapathy’s second stint living in the Sunshine State. Exactly 20 years ago, he spent more than two years in Tallahassee as a postdoc working at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
Since then, he has lived in places such as Buffalo, New York, where cold temperatures are the dominant extreme weather, not raging heat. But he, his wife and his two daughters see those extremes as part of the overall package of living in a community—and of life.
“Every place has its beautiful days and not so beautiful days. That’s part of life,” he says.
Far more important to the vibe and comfort of a place are the people, Ganapathy says. They lend an area its spirit. And in Buffalo, that tapestry included his role on the boards of multiple community groups and his family’s engagement in cultural and volunteer activities.
“We love to make friends, and we love to contribute to the community,” he says. “And I think we’re looking forward to that in Florida, as well.”
When You Are Not working, You Are…
Traveling:
“We are fortunate to have a large extended family all over the country, and so we travel a lot and explore things together.”
Outdoors:
“We love nature. We love just to be outside.”
Cycling, hiking:
“All kinds of activities. I’m looking forward to leveraging the nine months of beautiful weather!”
This piece was featured in the fall 2026 edition of Florida Tech Magazine.
