Tomorrow, late Ford Motor Company engineer Dr. Haren Gandhi will be posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame at “The Greatest Celebration of American Innovation” event, hosted in conjunction with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Dr. Gandhi had on the automotive landscape during his 43-year tenure at Ford. He held 167 patents worldwide, with 61 in the US, and perhaps his biggest contribution was in the area of exhaust gas catalysis. In fact, Ford says that it was because of Dr. Gandhi that the automaker became the first in the US to use non-platinum, non-rhodium three-way catalyst technology.
Dr. Haren Gandhi passed away in 2010, after being awarded five Henry Ford Technological Awards throughout the years, along with a National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2002. After his passing, Ford started the annual Dr. Haren Gandhi Research and Innovation Awards to honor others for their innovative contributions.
“He had one hand in the here and now that included the down-to-earth details of implementation and all the hard work behind the scenes that comes with it,” says Ford Senior Technical Leader Venkatesh Prasad about Dr. Haren Gandhi. “The other hand was in what we might call today a ‘saving the planet’ call, for us to engage in dialogue and address the problems of our collective future.”
Comment
Much of what I like about Ford is not how the vehicles look and operate, but how they’re engineered. I like that Mr Ghandi is honored by Ford for early and continued contributions to reducing environmental harm. I hope there are 50 or more people at Ford world-wide, not just Americans in America, who are also working on reducing the corporate carbon footprint in automobiles.