Prof Abhay Karandikar is currently the Director, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, one of the premier technical institutes of India. Prof Karandikar is also a Member (Part-Time) of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Before joining IIT Kanpur as the Director in April 2018, he served as Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He also served as Dean (Faculty Affairs) and Head of the Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Bombay. He spearheaded a national effort in setting up the Telecom Standards Development Society of India (TSDSI), India’s standards body for telecom with the participation of all stakeholders.
Prof Karandikar was the founding member and former Chairman of TSDSI. He serves on the board of several companies and has founded and mentored start-ups in telecom and networking. He was a member of the High-Level Forum on 5G set up by the Government of India and Chaired the 5G Spectrum Policy, Task Force. Prof Karandikar has several patents issued and pending, contributions to IEEE, and 3GPP standards contributed chapters in books and a large number of papers in international journals and conferences to his credit. Prof Karandikar was awarded IEEE SA’s Standards Medallion in December 2016 in New Jersey. His team also won Mozilla Open Innovation challenge prize in March 2017 for his work on rural broadband and digital empowerment in rural India. He is a co-author of papers that won the Best paper awards in ACM MobiHoc 2009, Workshop on Indoor and Outdoor Small Cells WiOpt2014 and a finalist for the best paper award in IEEE LCN 2012 and IEEE NCC 2014 conferences.