Washington: US President Barack Obama has felicitated Indian-American scientist Thomas Kailath with the top presidential medal for transformative contributions to the fields of science and technology.

Kailath, 79, received the National Medal of Science at a White House function here yesterday. "Thomas Kailath came to this country from India at the age of 22, with a research assistantship that took him to MIT, and then Stanford, where he made critical contributions in information theory and statistics, and mentored more than 100 scholars along the way," Obama said.