Mahendra Sunkara is the founding Director of the Conn Center for Renewable Engineering Research, Professor of Chemical Engineering and University Scholar at University of Louisville. Dr. Sunkara received his B. Tech. degree in Chemical Engineering from Andhra University (India) in 1986, a M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Clarkson University in 1988, and a PhD in 1993 from Case Western Reserve. He did his PhD under guidance of Prof. John Angus on chemical vapor deposition of diamond. He worked at Faraday Technology, Inc. in Dayton, OH, from 1993-1996 as a Project Engineer before joining UofL as an assistant professor in 1996.

Mahendra’s primary research is in the development of such renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies as solar cells, lithium ion batteries, electrochromics, production of hydrogen from water, and process development for growing large crystals of diamond, gallium nitride, and bulk quantities of nanowires. He has published over 170 articles in refereed journals, four book chapters, and was awarded over 30 U.S. patents. He co-authored a book entitled “Inorganic Nanowires: Applications, Properties and Characterization” published by CRC Press. He was awarded the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty in Engineering award in 1999 and a NSF CAREER award in 1999. In 2002, the Louisville Magazine placed him in the list of top 25 young guns in the city of Louisville. In 2009, he received the UofL President’s distinguished faculty award for research and United Phosphorus CDS Award from the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2009. He has been named as Fellow of Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation in 2017 and was awarded as a HealthCare Hero by Louisville Business First in 2022. His research work was cited about 14800 times with an h-index of 57. He graduated over 20 M.S/M.Eng and 30 PhD students who found successful careers in academia as faculty at institutions such as RPI, Texas A&M, U of Arkansas, IIT – Hyderabad, Oklahoma State and in Industry such as Intel, HP, Lam Research, Veeco, Applied Materials, and Lexmark, etc. He served on the board of a publicly traded company, Karuturi Global and serves on the editorial boards of Nanotechnology and Nature Scientific Reports. He founded and grew Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research at University of Louisville in 2009 to a center of excellence focused on the development of commercializable energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies.

He founded ADEM Technologies, LLC (formerly known as Advanced Energy Materials, LLC) in 2011 to commercialize his technology on scalable manufacturing of nanowire based materials for catalysts, batteries and absorbents. The company entered into commercial scale production and sales of advanced catalysts and adsorbents for removal of sulfur from diesel and fuels and hydrogenation applications around the world.

He also founded a regional energy business education commercialization convergence accelerator (REBECCA – http://www.rebecca-techhub.com), a consortium of industry, educational instituitions and government agencies to establish an innovation ecosystem across the state of Kentucky and southern Indiana.