Pramod Viswanath

Pramod Viswanath holds the Gilmore Family Endowed Professorship and is designated Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with additional affiliation to the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL).

Education:

• Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley, 2000

Research Interests:

Viswanath’s work focuses on the intersection of wireless communication networks and information theory, with recent expansion into cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. He seeks to understand fundamental limits of reliable wireless communication and to translate these insights into practical network designs that jointly optimize medium-access control, networking, and the time-varying wireless channel. Beyond wireless, he investigates broader questions of optimal network information compression, distributed trust mechanisms, and resource-efficient consensus protocols for blockchains.

Scientific Awards:

• NSF CAREER Award, 2003
• Bernard Friedman Prize, Department of Mathematics, UC Berkeley, 2000
• Eliahu Jury Award, Department of EECS, UC Berkeley, 2000
• Motorola Gold Medal, Indian Institute of Science, 1995
• M R Khambati Gold Medal, Indian Institute of Science, 1995
• Associate Editor for Communications, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2006–2008)

Grants & Projects:

Viswanath currently leads or co-leads multi-institutional efforts such as Unit-e, a high-throughput cryptocurrency initiative under the Distributed Technology Research (DTR) foundation involving MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. He is also PI on the Army Research Office grant “Rethinking Cryptocurrencies for Resource-Constrained Networks” ($588,850 over three years) aimed at redesigning blockchain architectures for storage- and network-constrained environments.

Labs & Teams:

He is a core faculty member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), where he collaborates with post-docs and graduate students on distributed systems, information-theoretic security, and next-generation wireless protocols.