Pramod K. Varshney was born in Allahabad, India, in 1952. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (with highest honors), and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1972, 1974, and 1976 respectively.
From 1972 to 1976, he held teaching and research assistantships with the University of Illinois. Since 1976, he has been with Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science. He was the Executive Director of CASE during 2009-2023 where he was responsible for technology transition of university expertise to make economic impact in the high-tech economy of New York. He served as an Associate Chair of the department from 1993 to 1996. He is also an Adjunct Professor of radiology with Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY, USA. He has published extensively. He is the author of Distributed Detection and Data Fusion (New York, NY, USA: Springer-Verlag, 1997). His current research interests include distributed sensor networks and data fusion, detection and estimation theory, wireless communications, image processing, radar signal processing, physical layer security, and machine learning.
Dr. Varshney was a James Scholar, a Bronze Tablet Senior, and a fellow while at the University of Illinois. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi. He received the 1981 ASEE Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award. In 1997, he was elected to the grade of fellow of the IEEE for his contributions in the area of distributed detection and data fusion. In 2000, he received the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE and the Chancellor’s Citation for exceptional academic achievement at Syracuse University. He also received the IEEE 2012 Judith A. Resnik Award, Doctor of Engineering Honoris Causa from Drexel University in 2014, the ECE Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Illinois in 2015, the ISIF’s Yaakov Bar-Shalom Award for a Lifetime of Excellence in Information Fusion in 2018, the Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Pioneer Award from the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Society in 2021, and Syracuse University Chancellor’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. He was the Guest Editor of the special issue on data fusion of the IEEE PROCEEDINGS in 1997. He has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal on Advances in Information Fusion, IEEE Transactions of Signal Processing as well as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine among others. He was the President of International Society of Information Fusion in 2001.