Prof. Lalit Mohan Patnaik obtained his PhD in 1978 in the area of Real-Time Systems, D.Sc. in 1989 in the areas of Computer Systems and Architectures, both from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. During March 2008 – August 2011, he was the Founding Vice Chancellor, Defence Institute of Advanced Technology, Deemed University, Pune. For more than four decades, he had an illustrious career as a faculty member with the IISc, Bangalore, where starting from early 1980s he had initiated several novel research areas in computer science and engineering. Currently he is a NASI (National Academy of Sciences India) Senior Scientist and Adjunct Professor with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.

He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Trieste, Italy, Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Computer Society of India.

His research interests span high performance computing, soft computing, VLSI system design, machine learning, data analytics, social networks, and machine consciousness. In these areas he has published over 1300 research papers, Books/Book chapters and Reports. One of his research papers on adaptive genetic algorithms has been cited over 4000 times by Google Scholar.

He has significantly contributed to four premier organisations of the country during their formative stages; CDAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), NBRC (National Brain Research Centre), IIIT Allahabad, DIAT(Defence Institute of Advanced Technology). He had played a pivotal role in initiating key Conferences such as HiPC, International Conference on VLSI Design, ADCOMM and many more.

As a recognition of his contributions in the areas of Electronics, Informatics, Telematics and Automation, he was awarded the Dr. Vikram Sarabhai Research Award . He was awarded more than thirty prestigious awards and honours like the Platinum Jubilee Lecture Award (CS), Indian Science Congress, the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award for contributions to parallel, distributed, and soft computing and high performance genetic algorithms. , the VASVIK Award and the Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru National Award for Engineering and Technology, to name just a few of them.

It needs to be emphasized that his training as well as research work done by him are entirely indigenous and his contributions to Indian higher technical education system are outstanding. His passion has been to improve the quality of research in Engineering Colleges by organising international conferences ,co-authoring papers with faculty members and students, mentoring students, delivering invited talks, and serving as Advisor on various committees of several Engineering Colleges across the country.