Varshney Family Scholarship

Established 2017

This scholarship was established by Pramod K. (BSEE/CS '72, MS '74, PhD '76) and Anju Varshney to recognize the hard work of undergraduates in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Pramod K. Varshney was born in Allahabad, India, in 1952. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (with highest honors), and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1972, 1974, and 1976 respectively.

During 1972-76, he held teaching and research assistantships at the University of Illinois. Since 1976 he has been with Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Director of CASE: Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering. He served as the Associate Chair of the department during 1993-96. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Radiology at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY. His current research interests are in distributed sensor networks and data fusion, detection and estimation theory, wireless communications, physical layer security, image processing, and radar. He has published extensively. He is the author of Distributed Detection and Data Fusion, published by Springer-Verlag in 1997.

While at the University of Illinois, Dr. Varshney was a James Scholar, a Bronze Tablet Senior, and a Fellow. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and is the recipient of the 1981 ASEE Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award. He was elected to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in 1997 for his contributions in the area of distributed detection and data fusion. In 2000, he received the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE and Chancellor’s Citation for exceptional academic achievement at Syracuse University. He is the recipient of the IEEE 2012 Judith A. Resnik Award. He received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from Drexel University in 2014.  He is the recipient of ISIF's Yaakov Bar-Shalom Award for a Lifetime of Excellence in Information Fusion in 2018He was the President of International Society of Information Fusion during 2001.

Dr. Varshney is a recipient of the ECE Distinguished Alumni Award for his contributions to the science of information fusion, as a pioneering researcher and distinguished educator. He is currently a distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Director of the Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering (CASE) at Syracuse University.

Description:

This scholarship was established to recognize and reward outstanding upperclassmen who have put in significant effort to improve their understanding of electrical and computer engineering, which may be evidenced by a significant increase in the student's GPA or similar indicators.

Award:

The recipient(s) will be recognized at the annual ECE Student Awards and Recognition Banquet.  All student recipients are featured on the second floor of the ECE Building's Student Honors Wall. 

Past Recipients of the Award

Year Recipients
2023-2024 Yiming Gong
2022-2023 Blerim Abdullai, Hongbo Zheng
2021-2022 Ryu Okubo, Mingyang Sheng
2020-2021 Alice Perng