Prof V Rajaraman Chair

About

The Prof V Rajaraman Chair Professorship on Information and Computation Sciences for professors of the Institute has been established to promote research excellence in relevant departments in IISc (departments under the EECS division and other allied departments such as CDS, SERC), honoring the distinguished academic contributions of Professor V Rajaraman, who taught and had a great influence on donor Dr Rajagopalan Srinivasan.

Dr Srinivasan has also supported several other initiatives at three departments of IISc – Electrical Communication Engineering (ECE), Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) and Computer Science and Automation (CSA):

• IISC-NVDA Rajagopalan Srinivasan ECE Department Library
• IISC-NVDA Rajagopalan Srinivasan CSA Department Computer Laboratory
• IISC-NVDA Rajagopalan Srinivasan SERC DGX Cluster for AI/ML

Note IISC here refers to Dr Srinivasan’s three alma maters — IITM, IISc, USC. 

In ECE, he has established a PhD medal that recognizes the ‘Best PhD Thesis in Devices, Circuits & System’.

Nomination Procedure

• The Chair would be awarded to a nominated faculty member with stellar performance. The selection committee for this purpose will be a national level committee that will be headed by a Divisional Chair and will include two distinguished experts external to IISc. Each term of the award is of three years duration. Additional terms could be awarded (in exceptional cases) to the same candidate faculty (if the faculty member gets nominated again) based on the recommendation of the selection committee.
• The nominator should be a Full Professor at the Institute.
• It will be awarded to a Professor in the EECS division.
  ln case of no suitable candidates found by the selection committee at the Professor level, fresh applications will be invited from Associate Professors with a minimum of three years of service. The quantum of support in this case will be lower for the entire term of the position.

Benefits

• The selected incumbent will occupy the Chair for a period of three years. A monthly top-up salary and an annual research grant will be provided, with the quantum of support being proportional to the faculty’s position.
• The Chair Associate Professor/Professor will be required to submit a brief annual report to the Director, IISc on the research activities conducted with the financial support received.

Rajagopalan Srinivasan

Dr Rajagopalan Srinivasan is an IISc alumnus from the regular ME 1988 batch of the ECE department. After IISc, he went on to pursue PhD in Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. He started his long technical career in 1994 with Sun Microsystems in the San Francisco Bay Area, before relocating to New Jersey due to his spouse’s medical residency program. He worked at Lucent Bell Labs and later at Intel Corporation in New Jersey and California. In 2009, he joined Nvidia headquarters and finally retired in 2025.

Dr Srinivasan has generously funded several initiatives at IISc. In addition to the two initiatives outlined below, he has extended his support to various infrastructure projects within the ECE, CSA, and CDS departments.

The Prof V Rajaraman Chair Professorship on Information and Computation Sciences has been established to promote research excellence in relevant departments within IISc (departments under the EECS division and other allied departments such as CDS, SERC). The Chair Professorship is a small tribute towards honoring the distinguished academic contributions of Prof V Rajaraman, who taught, mentored, and had a great influence on Dr Srinivasan.

The Dr Rajagopalan Srinivasan Medal is annually awarded to a stellar PhD student within ECE Department, pursing research in one or more of the following areas – Communications, Signal Processing & Machine Learning, Nanoelectronics & VLSI Systems, Networks & Optimization.