Prof. Anurag Kumar (B.Tech (1977) IIT Kanpur, PhD (1981) Cornell Univ.) was a Member of Technical Staff in AT&T Bell Laboratories (1981-1988), before returning to India and joining the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as a faculty member in the ECE Department. He became a Professor in 1996, the Director of IISc during 2014-2020, and an Honorary Professor after his superannuation in 2020. Since 1st January, 2024, he is an Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Distinguished Professor. He has published about 200 peer reviewed papers in journals and conferences, in the area of performance analysis, optimisation, and control of communications networks and distributed systems.
Prof. Kumar returned to India at a time when the telecommunications revolution was just taking off and the Internet was just a fledgling network. He was one of the leaders of the ERNET project that established India’s first nationwide Internet, that carried academic traffic for over a decade. Prof. Kumar was one of the early researchers in India in the mathematical approach to understanding and designing communication networks. He has consulted for government and private organisations, and has mentored a networking start-up from its early years to a global footprint. He has led the authorship of two major books that have been used around the world.
He was the 1977 President’s Gold Medallist in IIT Kanpur. He received the IISc Alumni Award for Excellence in Engineering Research for 2008. He has been elected Fellow of the IEEE, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), the Indian Academy of Science (IASc), and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). During the period 2005-2009, he was an area editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and was then on its steering committee from 2010-2014. He received the 2015 Vasvik Award for Information Technology, and the 2017 IEI-IEEE Award for Engineering Excellence. He is a recipient of the J.C. Bose National Fellowship, awarded by the Department of Science Technology, for the period 2011-2021.