To understand how far Subra Suresh has come since growing up in the south of India, consider this: In 1977, the 21-year-old Suresh took his first trip on an airplane. The flight took him from Madras (now Chennai), India, to Ames, Iowa, where he began a graduate program in engineering at Iowa State University. Thirty-three years later, in his first week as director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Suresh twice flew halfway around the world-to a meeting of national funding agencies in Belgium and to Hawaii for an event that gave him the chance to meet with a powerful U.S. senator-and within 36 hours he was back in his 12th-floor office at NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
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