Vijay Alreja, president of the New York-based VJ Group, has been awarded the Ray H. Witt Metallurgy Award from the Advanced Casting Research Center (ACRC) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The award, presented at the recent ACRC biannual meeting on the WPI campus, recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the metal casting industry.
Alreja, an expert in applying X-ray technologies to metals testing, was recognized for his leadership in the aluminum casting industry, resources he invested to broaden the technology base, techniques and concepts he introduced to advance the field, and his mentoring of future talent.
“Vijay Alreja has devoted his career to developing and establishing Non Destructive Evaluation [NDE] methods for us to see things we normally could not see,” said Diran Apelian, director of ACRC. “He is a very special individual, and he and his team at VJT have transformed and enhanced the metal casting industry’s capabilities.”
Apelian said few people have had a more far-reaching impact in the world of metal technologies than Alreja. Today the three divisions of VJ Group have made significant impacts. In 1987 he founded VJ Technologies (VJT), a leading global provider of X-ray inspection solutions applying radioscopic digital imaging expertise to government agencies and nondestructive testing markets throughout the world.
Meanwhile, VJ Electronix (VJE) provides automated Rework and X-ray inspection systems for a variety of electronics and industrial applications, and VJ X-Ray (VJX) integrates proven technology and standard designs with modern manufacturing processes to develop customer-compliant digital X-ray inspection systems for the electronics, food, industrial NDT, medical, and security markets.
Alreja received a degree in metallurgical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay in 1980, and a master’s in materials science from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1983.
The Witt award was established in 1999 in memory of Ray H. Witt, one of the founding members of ACRC and a prominent player in the global casting industry, and commemorates Witt’s outstanding contributions to the industry.
About Advanced Casting Research Center
The ACRC is an academic-industry partnership headquartered on the campus of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass. Built on the university’s strengths and focused on helping industry solve technical issues, the center provides a collaborative environment in which members, faculty, and students discuss challenges in the metal casting industry, specifically in the areas of light metals, non-ferrous alloys, and semi-solid processing.
