Currently I am serving as Secretary to the Government of India, Departement of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Science and Technology from October 3, 2023.

I am on lien from IIT Bombay. Before joining DST, I served as the Director, IIT Kanpur from April 18th, 2018 to September 25th, 2023. I joined IIT Bombay in April 1997. In IIT Bombay, I served as the Dean (Faculty Affairs) from February 2017- April 2018 and the Head of the Electrical Engineering Department from January, 2012 to January, 2015. During 2014-17, I also served as the first Professor-in- charge of IIT Bombay Research Park. I was the Head of Computer Center of IIT Bombay from August 2008 to July 2011.

My group at IIT Bombay has made contributions to numerous global standardization initiatives on telecommunications. The IEEE standard on beyond 5G - "IEEE 1930.1: Software Defined Networking (SDN) based Middleware for Control and Management of Wireless Networks" led by Mr Pranav Jha from our group and approved in 2022, was the first ever IEEE standard coming out of Indian efforts. As part of our contributions towards IEEE 1930.1, many innovations have been proposed which can make the mobile communications technology much more cost effective by bringing together the unlicensed radio technologies like Wi-Fi and cellular radio technologies like 4G, 5G and the upcoming 6G under a single umbrella.

Our research group at IIT Bombay also pioneered the novel concept of “Frugal 5G Networks” for affordable rural broadband connectivity. We also initiated standardization activity on the concept as part of the IEEE 2061: Architecture for Low Mobility Energy Efficient Network for Affordable Broadband Access standard. This standard, also led by Mr Pranav Jha from my research group as Working Group Chair, has been approved by IEEE Standards Association in June 2024 and is now part of the IEEE suite of global standards. Coming on the heels of IEEE 1930.1, this is the second IEEE standard largely coming out of the research efforts of our lab. While the primary focus of the standard is to enable affordable broadband connectivity to unconnected, it also introduces additional novel concepts, such as, RAN-Core decoupling, Core bypass, unified heterogenous access network etc. which may prove useful for the upcoming 6G system.

Our research group has also initiated standards development work on 6G system under ITU-T. The proposed group of standards, once ready, has the potential to transform the architecture of future mobile communications systems, namely the 6G system, to make it more scalable, flexible, modular, secure and easier to deploy as compared to the 5G and other earlier generation mobile communications systems. ITU-T Y.2325, ‘Architectural evolution for Next Generation Network control plane by applying Software-Defined Networking technology’, the first standard in this direction was approved and published by ITU-T in December 2023.

Our research group has also made multiple contributions to 3GPP 5G advanced in the areas of satellite communications, broadcast-broadband convergence, energy efficient networks, and wireless relays in the recent past.

I have given large number of talks and tutorials in national and international fora. Some of the talks and presentations are given here. My recent PhD graduates' research has proposed some novel framework in SDN, RAN Virtualization, Frugal 5G and Scalable core network design for beyond 5G. These research works can be accessed here. A number of patents have been filed by our group in these areas.