Surendra Prasad, born on 10 July 1948, did his graduate studies in electronics and electrical communication engineering and after passing BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1969, he moved to the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi from where he completed MTech in 1971. Subsequently, he joined IIT Delhi the same year as a member of faculty and simultaneously enrolled for his doctoral studies there to secure a PhD in 1974. In 1976, he took a sabbatical to work at Loughborough University of Technology as a visiting research fellow and returning to India in 1977, he resumed his career at IIT Delhi where he served till his superannuation as the director, a post he held from 2006 to 2011. In between, he had a second stint abroad at Pennsylvania State University as a visiting faculty during 1985-86. At IIT Delhi, he served in various positions as a professor, coordinator of the Bharti School of Telecom Technology and Management, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and deputy director. Post-retirement, he is an Usha Chair Professor at IIT Delhi and an Emeritus professor at BSTTM. He also serves as the chair of the National Board of Accreditation, an autonomous agency of the All India Council of Technical Education. Prasad's wife is also an academic at University of Delhi and the family lives in Gurgaon, a city in the National Capital Region of India. One of the two sons of the couple died an unnatural death in 2015.
Legacy
Prasad's early researches have been primarily in the fields of Signal Processing, Communication Theory and Speech Processing and he is known to have contributed to the development of new techniques, algorithms and hardware. He is reported to have done notable work on optimum signals and receivers, array pattern synthesis, optimum MTI filters, time delay estimation and underwater data communication, deconvolution of seismic signals and silicon compilation; the last one having applications in the designing of very large scale integrated circuits. Later, he worked on broadband communications, specifically on Very-high-bit-rate digital subscriber line and Wireless communications. His researches have been documented in several peer-reviewed articles; the online article repository of Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 67 of them. He is the author of a number of video courses on communications engineering and has been associated with several government agencies including the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research as a member of its governing body and society. He has edited three books and served as the guest editor of Journal of Research of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers for its June 2015 issue. He was also on the jury panel for the ICT Business Awards for the year 2014.
Awards and honors
Prasad received Vikram Sarabhai Research Award in 1987 and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 1988. Six years later, he was selected for the 1994 Om Prakash Bhasin Award and the VASVIK Industrial Research Award reached him in 2006. The year 2007 brought him two awards; Systems Society of India awarded him the Rajkumar Varshney Award for lifetime achievement in systems theory and his alma mater, Indian Institute of Kharagpur chose him for the Distinguished Alumnus Award. Besides, he became a graduand of Loughborough University when he received the degree of Doctor of Technology in July 2007. He was elected as a fellow by the Indian National Science Academy in 1994 and the Indian Academy of Sciences followed suit in 1997. He became an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India in 2009. He is also a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. The award orations delivered by him include 2010 Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan Memorial Lecture of the Indian National Science Academy.
