Alum Radha Poovendran named IEEE Fellow; department chair

Alumnus Radha Poovendran (EE Ph.D. 1999) has been elected a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), effective Jan. 1, 2015. The citation reads, “for contributions to security in cyber-physical systems.”

He also has been appointed chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington.

At Maryland, Poovendran was advised by Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR) and received the ECE Department's inaugural Graduate Student Service Award (1999). He also won NSA's LUCITE Rising Star award in 1999. He joined the University of Washington faculty in 2001 and became a full professor in 2010. Poovendran also is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award (2001), an ARO Young Investigator award (2002), an ONR Young Investigator award (2004), a PECASE award (2005), and was named a Kavli Frontiers Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (2007).

Poovendran is the founding director of the Network Security Lab (NSL). His research interests focus on communications, network security, and cryptography.

Of these latest honors, Baras writes, “Radha has rapidly established himself as a leading researcher, scholar and innovator in the area of security as well as in communications and control, with many seminal results in his record already. The recognition of his leadership capabilities is well deserved. Radha was a brilliant and wonderful student. He introduced me to the area of network security, where I have devoted considerable efforts over the last fifteen years.”

Published January 15, 2015