Prof. Prabhat Ranjan
Prof. Prabhat Ranjan was educated in IIT Kharagpur and Delhi University before receiving his PhD degree from University of California, Berkeley based on his research on "Nuclear Fusion" at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory during 1983-86.
He returned immediately to India to participate in the Nuclear Fusion program of the country. He continued his research in Nuclear Fusion area at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta and at Institute for Plasma Research(IPR), Gandhinagar. During this he was successful in bringing fusion reactor at both the places to International levels of performance. He was Project Leader of largest Indian Fusion Reactor, ADITYA from 1996 to 2002. He also designed the Real Time Plasma Control system for SST-1 superconducting Tokamak and was Project Leader of SST-1 Operational and Control Group.
From 2002 onwards he is Professor at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar (DA-IICT). His current research interests include Sensor Networks, Embedded Systems and Linux.
Currently he is engaged in applying sensor network technology to wildlife research and Planetary Exploration among other areas. His work of using Sensor Network for wildlife is internationally recognized and referred. He was invited to give a plenary talk at an international conference in Sydney (Dec 2008).
He is working on a major project to detect presence of water in the permanently shadowed craters of moon using Sensor Network technology as part of Chandrayaan mission. He is also working to set up a Lunar Seismic Sensor network.
He has published many research papers in national and international journals and represented India in several IAEA conferences. He was state topper of a prestigious Admission Test in 1970 and was recipient of National Science Talent Award in 1976. He won IBM Faculty Linux Innovation grant in 2004 on global basis. Recently his team received first prize in HP Innovate 2009 for developing an assistive device for cerebral palsy students. He has extensively traveled within India and abroad in various conferences and meetings.
