Priya Ranjan

Priya Ranjan (M’1997) graduated from IIT Kharagpur (EE, 1997, Est.: 1954), West Bengal, India and earned M.S. (EE) and Ph.D. (ECE) degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA (Est.: 1856) in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He was introduced to control theory by well-known researchers including Prof. K.B. Dutta of EE-IITKGP, and to nonlinear dynamics by Prof. Soumitro Banerjee (Bhatnagar Awardee). To pursue his passion for discovering new ideas in control theory and applications, he joined the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR, Bangalore), a DRDO lab under the tutelage of Prof. M. Vidyasagar. To continue and expand his studies, in 1997 he moved to the Computer-Aided Control Systems Engineering (CACSE) lab at the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland under the guidance of Prof. E.H. Abed where he would spend the next twelve years in Maryland in various capacities. There, his work was supported by leading government funding agencies including NSF and DARPA, apart from multiple grants from various branches of the US Department of Defense. His work in nonlinear analysis of networking protocols pursued a non-conventional narrative, where non-linearity is an intrinsic property of network technologies, and the system plays the role of protagonist. His work revealed fabulous interactions of system dynamics with delays, which are naturally present in remotely operated networked systems. These interactions generate a beautiful canvas of behaviors in infinite dimensions. He managed to discover a constant which is the current limit for global stability in the presence of arbitrary delays, work which proudly stands on the shoulders of research legends like Kelley, Sharkovsky, Mallet-Paret, and Ivanov, to move towards more general and realistic engineering cases. Lately, he is exploring into instabilities of consensus along with its implementation in TCP/IP with his student, Mr. Parshal Chitrakar.