Meet Sethuraman Panchanathan, first Indian-American named for top US engineering award

In 1969, eight-year-old Sethuraman Panchanathan stood in a queue outside the American Center in Chennai with his father and hundreds of others. They had come to see rocks brought back from the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. The rocks themselves did not impress him as much as the science and engineering that had made their journey possible.“The rocks were just rocks,” Panchanathan recalled as quoted by Arizona State University news. “But what fascinated me was all the human ingenuity and scientific prowess that went into bringing them here.”That experience became an early influence on Panchanathan, who went on to build a career in engineering, science and technology policy.