Prof. Ramesh R. Rao,
Director, Calit2 UC San Diego
Ramesh Rao is the Director of the University of California, San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). He also currently serves as the QUALCOMM Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering department of the Jacobs School of Engineering, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1984.
Prior to becoming UCSD division director of Calit2 in 2001, Dr. Rao was Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) at UCSD. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1984, and also received his M.S. from the university in College Park, MD.
In addition to directing the UCSD division of Calit2, Professor Rao leads several major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects as principal investigator, including the NIH-funded Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD), NSF-funded Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE) and ResponSphere, and Adaptive Systems project co-funded by the UC Discovery Grant program and Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson.
Dr. Rao's research interests include architectures, protocols and performance analysis of computer and communication networks, and he has published extensively on these topics. In 2005-'07 he chaired a National Research Council Committee on Using Information Technology to Enhance Disaster Management, whose findings were published in 2007 by NRC as "Improving Disaster Management: The Role of IT in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery." In 2003, he was principal investigator and chair of an NSF Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Research for Homeland Security. Since 1984, Dr. Rao has authored over 100 technical papers, contributed book chapters, conducted short courses and delivered invited talks and plenary lectures.
He earned his undergraduate BE (Honors) degree in electronics and communications in 1980 from the Regional Engineering College of the University of Madras in Tiruchirapalli, India.