Rate My Professor Prashanta Dutta

Prashanta Dutta is the Richard Schneider Jr. Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University, where he also serves as Director of the NSF NRT-LEAD Program, Project Director of the GAANN-STAR program, and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2001, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of South Carolina in 1997, M.S.M.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 1996, and B.S.M.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 1994. Dutta joined Washington State University in 2001 as an Assistant Professor, advanced to Associate Professor in 2007, and became a full Professor in 2013. His research focuses on microfluidics and nanofluidics, transport modeling for thermal, chemical, and biological systems, multiscale modeling and simulation of protein-protein interactions, drug delivery and discovery, electrokinetic flow, separation, and purification, and energy conversion and storage. Additional interests include physics and data-driven machine learning, Bayesian inference for inverse problems, micro/nanofluidic sensors and actuators, drug delivery through the blood-brain barrier, and thermal analysis of microscale liquid flow.

Dutta has made significant contributions through key publications such as “Machine Learning Assisted Inverse Heat Transfer Problem to Find Heat Flux in Ablative Materials” (Materials Today Communications, 2025), “Prediction of Peptide-TIM3 Binding Site to Inhibit TIM3-galectin 9 Binding Pathways” (ACS Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 2023), “Physics-Informed Deep Neural Network for Inverse Heat Transfer Problems in Materials” (Materials Today Communications, 2023), “LINES: Log-Probability Estimation via Invertible Neural Networks for Enhanced Sampling” (ACS Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 2022), and “Overcoming Blood Brain Barrier Transport: Advances in Nanoparticle-based Drug Delivery Strategies” (Materials Today, 2020). He has received numerous awards, including Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2025), Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2013), Fulbright US Scholar Award (2016-2017), Donald N. Zwiep Innovation in Education Award (2024), Washington State Academy of Sciences Member (2024), and WSU Office of Research Excellence Award (2024). Dutta has held editorial roles as Deputy Editor of Electrophoresis since 2018 and Associate Editor of ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering from 2012 to 2015. He has led major grants from NSF and NIH on topics including convergent robotics training, nanopore force spectroscopy, multiscale modeling of blood-brain barrier transport, and affordable desktop learning modules for engineering education.