Prasanna Viktor

Prasanna Viktor is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), holding the Charles Lee Powell Chair in Engineering. He also serves as Director of the Center for Energy Informatics and has held leadership roles in interdisciplinary research centers such as the USC Infosys Center for Advanced Software Technologies. With a BE from Bangalore University, ME from Indian Institute of Science, and PhD from Pennsylvania State University, he is a globally recognized expert in reconfigurable computing, FPGA accelerators, and parallel computing.

His research focuses on high-performance architectures for applications in networking, security, HPC, and machine learning. Over 25 years, he has secured research grants totaling over $50M, including $12.9M from 2016–2021. He has advised over 70 doctoral students and published over 600 papers, earning 22 best paper awards. His work has led to IP cores with improved throughput, latency, and energy efficiency.

Prasanna is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS, and an elected member of Academia Europaea. He has received prestigious awards such as the W. Wallace McDowell Award (2015) and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IISc (2019). He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.

He leads interdisciplinary efforts in energy informatics and smart oilfield technologies, bridging computer science, engineering, and energy sectors. His contributions include foundational work in reconfigurable computing and FPGA-based accelerators for diverse applications.