Srikant: Grainger Distinguished Chair of Engineering
Chair: Grainger Distinguished Chair of Engineering
In 2013 the University of Illinois announced the establishment of the Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Initiative, a $100 million investment in the future of Engineering at Illinois. Supported by a pledge from The Grainger Foundation, this initiative will have far-reaching impact in several ECE research areas and the educational mission of the department. In particular, the initiative will focus on supporting research in the areas of big data and bioengineering.
The initiative will provide source funds to endow 35 professorships and chairs. Twenty-six of these will focus specifically on the areas of big data and bioengineering, and many will go toward recruiting senior faculty to Illinois in these research areas.
Rayadurgam Srikant
Professor R. Srikant’s research interests are in the areas of communication networks, queuing theory, information theory, game theory, and stochastic control. His current focus is on designing distributed algorithms for wireless networks, the Internet, and peer-to-peer networks, and understanding the fundamental limits of performance of such algorithms.
Srikant received his bachelor of technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1991 to 1995. He joined the University of Illinois in 1995 as a professor in the Department of General Engineering until 2003, when he joined the ECE Department. He is also a research professor in the Coordinated Science Lab.
He has been recognized for his research achievements with the NSF CAREER Award in 1997 and the Shimemura Young Author Prize from the Asian Control Conference in 2002. In 2006 he was named an IEEE Fellow. He has been a plenary speaker in many international conferences and workshops and was an invited speaker at a discussion meeting of the Royal Society, London in 2006.
He is an associate of the Center for Advanced Study during the 2008-2009 academic year. From 2005 to 2008 he was a Gilmore Family Faculty Scholar at Illinois. He has also been on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent on several occasions during his time at Illinois.
Srikant is active within his field, having served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Automatica and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He has also served a guest editor for special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He was a program co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM, 2006.
Srikant holds several patents and is the author of a book titled Mathematics of Internet Congestion Control, and a co-author of the monograph Network Optimization and Control.