Amit Goyal elected Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India

BUFFALO, N.Y. – University at Buffalo scientist Amit Goyal has been elected a Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, a prestigious honor recognizing his seminal contributions to the field of applied superconductivity.

Established in 1930, the National Academy of Sciences, India, is the oldest science academy of India. Its membership includes scientists, engineers and health professionals.

Goyal, PhD, is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

In an announcement last month, the Academy named him one of eight Foreign Fellows in 2025. Foreign Fellows are renowned for their scientific contributions, and have contributed to the progress of science in India.

The Academy recognized Goyal’s contributions in developing high-performance, single crystal-like, high-temperature superconductor (HTS) wires that are being advanced for large-scale applications, in particular, for the electric power industry. The potentially transformative, commercial nuclear fusion application via magnetic confinement is both an enabling and a niche application of HTS wires, Goyal says.

Goyal served as the 2006 and the 2010 American Society of Metals (ASM) – Indian Institute of Metals (IIM) Distinguished Lecturer, and gave lectures across India at leading universities, companies and national laboratories. The ASM-IIM visiting lectureship program, established in 1979, promotes international cooperation between ASM International and the materials science community in India.

He has mentored many Indian nationals as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows; currently, he mentors two postdoctoral fellows and one graduate student who are from India. Additionally, he has hosted many Indian colleagues both at UB and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he is an emeritus corporate fellow.

In 2005, Goyal received the Global Indus Technovator Award by a business club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These awards recognize distinguished innovators of South Asian origin working at the cutting-edge of technology that could be harnessed for far-reaching applications. In 2007, he received the Pride of India Gold Award from the NRI Institute, which recognized people of Indian origin around the world for outstanding achievements in their chosen fields. In 2009, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India.

In 2014, he led a $50 million U.S.-India proposal from Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the PACE-R (Partnership to Advance Clean Energy Research) U.S.-India initiative to accelerate clean energy research and development. The proposal was a collaboration between 10 leading institutions in India and 10 in the U.S. including academia, industry and national laboratories.

In 2016, Goyal was the featured keynote plenary speaker at the 1st International Conference on Advanced Materials at Amrita University, Coimbatore, India. In 2018, Goyal was invited to give the prestigious, 5th Institute Lecture at IIT-Madras titled “High-Temperature Superconductors: From Discovery to Applications.”  In 2019, as part of a funded project supported by the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, he co-organized and participated in a workshop on sensor technology for next generation internet of things, and he contributed to development of further joint proposals with IISc-Bengaluru. In 2019, he was invited to give a featured guest lecture at Kshitij, IIT-Kharagpur's annual innovation and techno-management symposium, which has now become one of Asia's largest innovation and techno-management symposiums.

Goyal is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He has been a member of the National Materials and Manufacturing Board since 2020 and is a Fellow of 10 professional societies including the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for Advancement of Science, the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the World Innovation Foundation, the American Society of Metals, the Institute of Physics, the American Ceramic Society and the World Technology Network. 

He has received numerous national and international accolades, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in the inaugural category of Energy Science and Innovation. The Energy Secretary bestows the award on behalf of the president of the United States. He was named the R&D Magazine’s Innovator of the Year in 2010 and received the 2012 World Technology Award in the category of materials. He has received 10 R&D 100 Awards, which are often regarded as the “Oscars of innovation,” and three national Federal Laboratory Consortium awards for technology transfer. In 2001, he received the Energy-100 Award for development of high-performance superconducting wires as one of the top 100 scientific accomplishments of the Department of Energy.