Satyanarayanan Chakravarthy is Co-Founder and Technical Lead of The ePlane Company and Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai. He earned his Bachelor of Technology from IIT Madras in 1991, followed by an MSc and PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. After a postdoctoral stint at Georgia Tech, he joined the IIT Madras faculty in 1997. His research spans propulsion and combustion in gas turbines, rocket engines and electric aircraft. He heads the National Centre for Combustion Research and Development at IIT Madras, which has secured over US$30 million in funding, and also leads the DRDO Centre of Propulsion Technology. Chakravarthy is Director of Agnikul Cosmos (mini launch vehicles), Aerostrovilos (fuel-agnostic micro gas turbines) and X2Fuels & Energy (waste-to-crude oil conversion). He advises GalaxEye (Earth observation satellites with edge computing). He has delivered TEDx talks, a 55-part graduate-level course on combustion and a semester-long course on electric aircraft propulsion, both produced through the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. He has also presented “Ubiquitous Flying” at the Mahindra Technical Academy’s Great Ideas for Tomorrow (GIFT) programme and at Amadeus’s aGeek series.