Dr. Panganamala Vijay Kumar

(MT/EE/1979)

Dr. Panganamala Vijay Kumar is currently a National Science Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. His research interests include algebraic coding theory and signal design, with applications to wireless cellular communication, distributed storage, and satellite navigation.
He received his B.Tech. in ECE from IIT Kharagpur in 1977, his M.Tech. in EE from IIT Kanpur in 1979, and his Ph.D. in EE from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1983. He served on the USC faculty from 1983 to 2003, including as a Full Professor from 1995 to 2003. In 2003, he joined the Department of ECE at IISc, where he served as Professor until 2021, as Department Chair from 2012 to 2014, and as an Honorary Professor from 2021 to 2026. In February 2026, he was appointed National Science Chair (Mode I) by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation. Since December 2025, he has also served as an Advisor to VyomIC, a Bengaluru-based space-tech startup.
Dr. Kumar's research has had significant practical impact: a pseudorandom sequence family he co-designed was adopted as the short scrambling code of the global 3G WCDMA cellular communication standard, and the IZ4 family of spreading codes he co-designed was incorporated by ISRO into the civilian L1 signal of NavIC and flown aboard the NVS-01 and NVS-02 satellites.
His honours include the 1994 USC School of Engineering Senior Research Award, the 1995 IEEE Information Theory Society Prize Paper Award, the 2011/12 IEEE Data Storage Best Paper Award, the 2013 Dr. Rustom Choksi Award for Excellence in Research in Engineering at IISc, and the J. C. Bose National Fellowship (2017-22). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the INAE, IAS, and INSA academies.
Honouring his pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of error-correcting codes and signal design for wireless communication, digital storage, and satellite-based navigation, IIT Kanpur confers upon Dr. Panganamala Vijay Kumar the Distinguished Alumni Award 2026 for Academic Excellence.