ECE Prof. Shreyas Sundaram joins CRISP as Associate Director
Purdue ECE faculty member, Shreyas Sundaram, has joined the Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes (CRISP) as Associate Director, effective August 15, 2019. Sundaram joins the current leadership team of Saurabh Bagchi (ECE and CS; Director), Jitesh Panchal (Mechanical Engineering; Associate Director), Felix Lin (ECE; Thrust Lead in Internet of Things), Nadia Gkritza (Civil Engineering and Agricultural and Biological Engineering; Thrust Lead in Socio-technical systems), and Gesualdo Scutari (Industrial Engineering; Thrust Lead in Optimization). Sundaram succeeds Milind Kulkarni as Associate Director. Kulkarni has become the co-Director of another center at Purdue called PurPL, based in ECE and Computer Science. He will continue to be involved with CRISP as an affiliate faculty member.
Sundaram’s work lies at the intersection of Network Science, Control, Communications, and Distributed Algorithms. In particular, his research focuses on the analysis of dynamics on large-scale networks. These networks are prevalent in both the natural world (e.g., genetic networks, ecological networks, social networks), and in engineered applications (e.g., the Internet, the power grid, industrial control networks, large robotic swarms). In these settings, it is essential for the overall system to be resilient to components that behave in unanticipated, incorrect, or malicious ways. Understanding the behavior of these complex systems requires us to consider both the network topology (i.e., who interacts with whom), and the network dynamics (i.e., what happens when two nodes interact). Drawing from diverse disciplines, Sundaram develops novel and mathematically rigorous techniques for designing reliable networks of dynamical systems.
Sundaram obtained his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, was a faculty member at the University of Waterloo until 2014, after which he came to Purdue. He became a tenured Associate Faculty in August 2018. En route, he won the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2017 for his project titled "Towards Secure Large-Scale Networked Systems: Resilient Distributed Algorithms for Coordination in Networks under Cyber Attacks". He also won the U.S. Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellowship in 2016.
“We are delighted to have someone with the technical and the administrative caliber of Shreyas join our leadership team,” says CRISP Director Saurabh Bagchi. “We have been working on several projects together in security of distributed systems in contested environments, such as battlefields, funded by NSF and Sandia. I know first-hand how Shreyas has a flair for directing challenging technical projects, as well as presenting their results to a diverse set of stakeholders.”
Sundaram says he is excited to join the outstanding CRISP leadership team and contribute to its important mission.
“By bringing together top-caliber faculty from across a wide range of disciplines at Purdue, CRISP is uniquely positioned to tackle many of the critical resilience challenges facing the systems that we all rely upon,” he says.
Further information on CRISP, including its new activities, can be found here: https://engineering.purdue.edu/CRISP
Source: ECE Faculty Shreyas Sundaram joins CRISP as Associate Director