Dr. Govind Gopakumar is currently Associate Professor in the Centre for Engineering in Society in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science at Concordia University. He has received many prestigious awards including the National Science Foundation’s (USA) Dissertation Improvement Grant. He is the 2010 recipient of the Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism given by the American Sociological Association for promising young scholars.
Dr. Gopakumar is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests are quite varied but broadly he is interested in how technological change becomes acceptable to society. In analyzing this puzzle he thinks that a combination of social, policy and technical dynamics play a defining role. His specific interests are in the policy dynamics of urban infrastructure change, social dimensions of the sustainability of water supply, globalization of urban infrastructure, interdisciplinarity in engineering education and social entrepreneurship for engineers.
Dr. Gopakumar received his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Prior to that he received a M.S. in Energy and Environmental Policy from the University of Delaware and completed an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technological University. He has a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from College of Engineering, University of Kerala, India.