Maritime College Announces ABS Chair Appointments: Captain Abhinandan Prasad & Dr. Jemerson James

Maritime College is excited to announce our ABS Chair appointments: Captain Abhinandan Prasad, A.F.N.I. (Marine Transportation) and Dr. Jemerson James (Naval Architecture).

Captain Abhinandan Prasad is an Assistant Professor of Marine Transportation with two decades of seagoing experience. A UK-licensed Master Mariner, he's served in senior deck officer roles aboard tankers, bulk carriers, and OBOs.

At Maritime, he teaches navigation, shipboard operations, advanced cargo operations, and Bridge Resource Management. His interests include simulator-based learning, maritime decision-making, and AI use in maritime training. His work has appeared in Seaways, the journal of The Nautical Institute.

As ABS Chair, he looks forward to strengthening collaboration between academia and industry and advancing applied research and workforce development.

Dr. James is an Assistant Professor of Naval Architecture at Maritime College, where he teaches Applied Naval Architecture, Ship Structure, Ship Hydrostatics, and Ocean Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in Ocean Engineering from Texas A&M University and a B.Tech. in Naval Architecture and Ship Building from Cochin University of Science and Technology.

Before teaching, he was a naval architect at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, working on LPG, chemical, and container carriers and contributing to a passenger ship design. His research focuses on extreme sea states, rogue wave predictability, and small-craft capsizing risk. He is currently building a high-performance computing lab for vessel hydrodynamics.

A former ABS scholarship recipient at Texas A&M, Dr. James looks forward to deepening Maritime College's partnership with ABS.

Congratulations again to Captain Prasad and Dr. James for this outstanding accomplishment!