Rate My Professor Sundaraja Iyengar

Sundaraja Sitharama Iyengar is the Distinguished University Professor, Ryder Professor of Computer Science, Founding Director of the Discovery Lab, and Director of the US Army-funded Center of Excellence in Digital Forensics at Florida International University’s Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences. He is also the Distinguished Chaired Professor at National Forensics Sciences University, Gandhinagar, India. Iyengar earned his Ph.D. in Engineering from Mississippi State University in 1974, M.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1970, and B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore in 1968. Previously, he served as Roy Paul Daniel’s Distinguished Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Louisiana State University from 1992 to 2011, where he supervised 45 Ph.D. students and elevated the program to one of the top-ranked nationally. He held earlier positions at Jackson State University from 1974 to 1980 and numerous visiting chaired professorships, including Satish Dhawan Chaired Professorship at the Indian Institute of Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Chaired Professorship at the University of Hyderabad, and roles at Asia University, University of Paris, Tsinghua University, and KAIST.

Iyengar’s academic interests encompass high-performance algorithms, distributed sensor networks, sensor fusion, intelligent systems, data science, machine learning algorithms, cybersecurity, digital forensics, computational biology, autonomous systems, and biomedical computing. He has published more than 600 research papers, authored or co-authored 32 books—including “Introduction to Parallel Algorithms” (John Wiley & Sons, 1998; translated into Chinese), “Multi-Sensor Fusion: Fundamentals and Applications with Software” (Prentice Hall PTR, 1998), “Scalable Infrastructure for Information Processing in Distributed Sensor Networks” (Springer Verlag, 2005), and “Wavelet Analysis with an Application to Image Processing” (CRC Press, 1997)—and edited volumes such as “Quantum Computing Environments” (Springer Nature, 2022). His Brooks-Iyengar algorithm for distributed sensor fusion received the 2019 IEEE Congress on Cybermatics Test of Time Award. Having supervised over 65 Ph.D. students and secured more than $65 million in research funding, Iyengar’s innovations have influenced biomedical engineering, medicine, and distributed systems applications. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of ACM, AAAS, NAI, AIMBE, and Washington Academy of Sciences; recipient of the Karnataka Rajyotsava Award (2023), four honorary Doctor of Science degrees (including Poznan University of Technology, 2023), IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (1998), and Lifetime Achievement Awards from INTERPOL (2022), IEEE, and Banaras Hindu University. Iyengar has chaired IEEE conferences, served on NSF and NIH panels, acted as founding editor of the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, and contributed to editorial boards of multiple IEEE and ACM journals.