Amit Singhal (B.E. '89 CST), SVP and Google Fellow, was among the recipients of the PAN IIT USA American Leadership Awards, which recognize outstanding achievements and accomplishments of IIT alumni who have made significant contributions to American society and throughout the world. The winners will be honored at a ceremony during Global PAN IIT 2013 Conference held in Houston from Friday, Dec 6th to Sunday, Dec 9th 2013.

More than 500 nominees were considered for these prestigious awards, which represent specific categories of achievement - Academic, Entreprenur, Corporate, Lifetime, Technology and Social Entrepreneur. “The American Leadership Award winners represent the best of IIT alumni in the U.S. with their diverse accomplishments and contributions to American job creation, education, and philanthropy,” said Gunjan Bagla, Founder and Managing Director of Amritt, Inc., Past President of PAN IIT USA and one of the driving forces behind these awards. "These alumni embody the spirit of our upcoming conference by truly bringing solutions for a better world through their thought leadership, business acumen and sense of social responsibility. We are humbled and awed by their accomplishments.”

Amit received this awards for Technology Leadership, jointly with Sunder Pichai, another SVP and Google Fellow and graduate of IIT Kharagpur.

Amit Singhal is a senior vice president and Google Fellow who is responsible for the development of Google search. Amit has worked in the field of search for more than 20 years, first as an academic researcher and now as a Google engineer. His research interests include information retrieval, its application to web search, web graph analysis and user interfaces for search. Amit Singhal has overseen Google's search engine ranking algorithms since 2000. The team tests thousands of changes to search in a given year, and launches more than 500. 

Prior to joining Google in 2000, Amit was a senior member of technical staff at AT&T Labs. He has an undergraduate degree in India from IIT, Roorkee, a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in computer science. At Cornell, he studied information retrieval with the late Gerard Salton, one of the founders of the field. Amit has co-authored more than 30 scientific papers and numerous patents.