The department of mechanical engineering at IIT Madras has produced some of the finest minds both in academia and industry over the years. Many of our alumni went on creating a greater impact to the society in various forms. The list below contains some of such distinguished alumnus of the department who were conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus award by IIT Madras.
- Mr. T. T. Jagannathan (1970/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Chairman, TTK Group
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 1996
- Dr. Subra Suresh (1977/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: President, Carnegie Mellon University
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 1997
- Dr. K. R. Rajagopal (1973/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University; also holds Forsyth Chair in Mechanical Engineering
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 1998
- Mr. Sunil Wadhwani (1974/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, iGate Corporation
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 1999
- Dr. V. Srinivasan (1966/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at the Stanford Business School
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2001
- Mr. S. Srinivasan (1964/BT/ME,1979/MS/CS)
- Designation/Organization: Chairman & Managing Director, SRA Systems Ltd.
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2001
- Dr. Gursharan Singh Sidhu (1967/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Founder, Chief Technology Officer & Sr.Vice President, NexVerse Networks Inc.,
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2002
- Dr. R. Mahadevan (1964/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Group Technology Director, India Pistons Limited
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2003
- Padmashri. M. Natarajan (1967/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Former Scientific Advisor to Defence Minister and Ex-Chief Controller R&D of DRDO
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2003
- Dr. Ashok Khanna (1967/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: CMD, Controls and Switchgear Group
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2004
- Dr. B. Ramachandra Pai (1965/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: (Retired) – Director of National Aerospace Laboratories
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2004
- Dr. B. N. suresh (1969/MT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Vikram Sarabhai distinguished Professor at ISRO
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2004
- Dr. Marti G. Subrahmanyam (1967/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Professor, Stern School of Business, New York
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2004
- Dr. A. Parasuraman (1970/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: James W. McLamore Chair in Marketing, Professor, and Department Chair, Marketing at University of Miami, USA
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2005
- Mr. Krishna ‘Kittu’ Kolluri (1986/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Venture Capitalist and Board Of Directors in Several Organizations
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2005
- Mr. Sunil Kumar (1971/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: President & CEO of International Speciality Products Inc, USA
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2006
- Mr. Bhaskar Bhat (1976/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Managing Director, Titan Industries Limited, Bangalore
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2008
- Mr. Vijay Kumar Magapu (1966/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Executive Director on L&T Board
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2008
- Dr. L. Mahadevan (1986/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics; Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology; Professor of Physics at Harvard University
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2009
- Mr. P. Venugopalan (1971/BT/ME,1979/MS/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Former Director of Defence Research & Development Laboratory
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2009
- Dr. Suresh V. Garimella (1985/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships; Goodson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Director, NSF Cooling Technologies Research Center, Purdue University
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2010
- Dr. Ramanathan V Guha (1986/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Computer scientist at Google
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2013
- Mr. Kannan Lakshminarayan (1988/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: “Parallel” Entrepreneur, Founder of several Organizations.
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2014
- Dr. Prakash Keshaviah (1967/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Director of Dialysis at Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2015
- Dr. Ramarathnam Narasimhan (1982/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2016
- Dr. Pradip Dutta (1987/BT/ME)
- Designation/Organization: Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
- Distinguished Alumni Award: 2017