Ravi Sankar received the B. E. (Honors) degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Madras, India, in 1978, the M. Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Concordia University, in 1980, and the Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, in 1985. Since then, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida, Tampa. He is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering, Supervisor of the Communications and Signal Processing graduate program track, Member of the Biomedical Engineering program and Director of the Interdisciplinary Communications, Networking and Signal Processing (iCONS) Research group and the Interdisciplinary Center of Excellence in Telemedicine (ICE-T).
His main research interests are in the areas of wireless communications, networking, and signal processing and its applications. In particular, he is interested in the resource and mobility managements of wireless cellular, ad-hoc, and sensor networks, energy-efficient design and cross-layer optimization. He is further interested in processing, coding, and recognition applications to speech, image, biomedical and other signals and in integrating intelligent techniques including the use of neural networks and fuzzy logic in the simulation, modeling, and design of high performance and robust systems. He has published widely in these areas with more than 140 papers in journals and premier international conferences. iCONS research group under his leadership has conducted successfully numerous research (over 30 externally funded projects) over the years (totaling over 5 million dollars) with the support from federal agencies (NASA, DoD, U.S. Army, NSF) and state agencies (Florida High Tech Council), and partnerships of several industries including Honeywell, Motorola, Raytheon, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Johnson & Johnson, Group Technologies, STS International. He has supervised 3 post-doctoral research, 6 Ph.D. dissertations, 40 M.S. theses/projects, and 14 B.S. senior design and REU projects to completion and is currently directing one post-doctoral researcher, 10 Ph.D., and 2 M.S. students
Dr. Sankar received the USF Theodore and Venette Askounes-Ashford Distinguished Scholar Award in 2007. He was the National Science Foundation (NSF) nominated short-term Invited Research Fellow of the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) in 2000 to conduct collaborative research on wireless communications in Japan. He was with Shinshu University, Japan and University of Melbourne, Australia during spring and summer 2000. His work experience includes being a research staff at the Rome Laboratory (US Air Force Research Lab) in summer 1997 and at Motorola in summer 1991. He was also the recipient of the IEEE Florida Council Outstanding Engineering Educator award in 1996 and the Outstanding Contributions in Research award for the best paper in 1997 from the ASEE (southeastern section). He is a senior member of IEEE, member of ACM and ASEE, and a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Florida. He is also a member of IEEE societies for Communications, Computer, Signal Processing, Circuits and Systems, and Engineering in Medicine and Biology, IEEE Technical Committees on Computer Communications and Personal Communications.
He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (2003-2009)and was a guest editor for the IEEE Transaction on Information Technology in Biomedicine. He currently serves in the Editorial Board of Research Letters in Signal Processing, Editorial board member of the International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems (IJCAS), and also Honorary Editorial Board member of Cancer Informatics. He has served on the organizing committees, technical program committees, and as a session organizer and chair for many IEEE conferences including Globecom, International Conf. on Communications (ICC), Southeastcon, Local Computer Networks (LCN), Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), The World Multi Conf. on SCI (Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics), and the International Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC) in the areas of communications and signal processing. He was the invited Keynote Speaker for the Fourth IASTED International Conference on Communications. Internet, and Information Technology (CIIT 2006), St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Dr. Sankar has delivered a number of invited lectures over the years internationally at several universities in India, South Korea, and Japan including Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai (IIT-M), in India, Kunsan National University, Wonkwang University, and Chonbuk National University, in Korea, and Japan Advance Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), in Japan. He also presented a special invited seminar for the Society of Mobile Technology of South Korea and was an invited speaker at the 8th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems (ISIS 2007), Sokcho, South Korea. He was the Organizer and Co-Chair of the first US-Korea Joint International Workshop on “Global Wireless Sensor Networks” (GWSN 2009), sponsored by NSF and KOSEF (Korea Science and Engineering Foundation) and other local Government enterprises and industries, held in Jeonju, South Korea, in June 2009.
He is the Chair and Founding Officer of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) chapter of the IEEE Florida west coast section. He was the Technical Program Chair for IEEE Southeastcon and the Vice-Chair for IEEE Signal Processing Society chapter in 1996. He co-guest edited a special issue of SIMULATION magazine on Simulation of Communication-Computer Networks in 1992. He has been a reviewer for IEEE 802 standards draft proposals and a referee for several journals and conferences.
Dr. Sankar is an approved mentor of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Minority Ph.D. Program (NACME) and Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Program (LSAMP) at USF. In addition he was also a co-investigator and mentor for the NSF funded IGERT program on SKINS (Sensory Knowledge based Interface Science).
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