IIT Kharagpur alumnus kills US professor at UCLA over academic spat

WASHINGTON: "William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy," Mainak Sarkar wrote on March 10 in a blog chillingly slugged "Long Dark Tunnel." He added: "I was this guy’s Phd student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it to another student. He made me really sick."On Wednesday, Sarkar, a 38-year old IIT Kharagpur alumnus, who had been working on a Ph.D at UCLA for several years, walked into Klug’s office in at University of California, Los Angeles’ Henri Samueli School of Engineering, and shot him dead . He then took his own life.Klug, who was only a year older than Sarkar, was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, the very subject the Indian student got his undergrad degree from IIT Kharagpur in 2000. Sarkar worked briefly as a software developer in Bangalore and came to the US in 2003 in to earn a master’s degree from Stanford, before enlisting as a doctoral student at UCLA with Klug as his advisor.UCLA has a large contingent of students from the subcontinent, as do many universities in the US with good engineering schools; In fact, both the current dean of the engineering school (Jayathi Murthy) and her predecessor (Vijay Dhir) are of Indian-origin.The Henri Samueli School of Engineering itself provides one of the most stellar examples of the very American ethos that encourages teacher-student collaboration. It is named after Henri Samueli, a professor whose mentoring of and partnership with his PhD student Henry Nicholas III that led to their co-founding eventually of Broadcom, a chip company that was bought for $ 37 billion by Avago couple years back. Both Samueli and Nicholas retired as billionaires in what is arguably one of the most financially successful student-teacher partnerships of all time.But the Klug-Sarkar relationship did not go according to that script. After initially praising Klug and thanking him in school records for being his mentor, Sarkar turned against him some months back as he neared his tenth year as a Phd student."Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust. Stay away from this sick guy," he wrote on his blog, accusing Klug of stealing his code and favoring another student.Klug’s friends and associates rubbished the accusations, saying it was "absolutely untrue" and "psychotic.""Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student," an unnamed source told LA Times about Klug, a father of two kids. "He helped him out and interceded for him academically."On the UCLA website Sarkar is listed as part of the Klug Research Group, a team of six postdoctoral and PhD students researching biomechanics. Two others, besides Sarkar, are of Indian-origin: Ankush Aggarwal, ME Ph.D. student, 2008-, and Shankarjee Krishnamoorthi, ME PhD student, 2009-. Sarkar is the seniormost of the lot with a Phd enrollment going back to 2006, two years longer than any of the others.In his doctoral dissertation, submitted in 2013, Sarkar expressed gratitude to Klug for his help and support. ''Thank you for being my mentor,'' he wrote in the acknowledgement.Then it all went sour.