Sethuraman Panchanathan is an
Indian-American
Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
and
academic administrator
Academic administration is a branch of university or college employees responsible for the maintenance and supervision of the institution and separate from the Faculty (academic staff), faculty or academics, although some personnel may have joint ...
, and the 15th Director of
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
since June 2020. He previously served as the Executive Vice President, ASU Knowledge Enterprise Development and Chief Research and Innovation Officer at
Arizona State University
Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...
(ASU). He was also Director of the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC), Foundation Chair of Computing and Informatics at ASU and Professor in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (CIDSE), part of the
Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering
The Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering (often abbreviated to the Fulton Schools) is the engineering college of Arizona State University. The Fulton Schools offers 25 undergraduate and 48 Graduate school, graduate degree programs in all major ...
.
Early life and education
Panchanathan was born and raised in
Chennai
Chennai (, ), formerly known as Madras ( the official name until 1996), is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state. The largest city of the state in area and population, Chennai is located on the Coromandel Coast of th ...
.
He attended the Vivekananda College (
University of Madras
The University of Madras (informally known as Madras University) is a public university, public State university (India), state university in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1857, it is one of the oldest and among the most prestigiou ...
), graduating in 1981 with a B.Sc. in physics. Subsequently, in 1984, he earned a B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the
Indian Institute of Science
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is a public, deemed, research university for higher education and research in science, engineering, design, and management. It is located in Bengaluru, in the Indian state of Karnataka. The institute wa ...
in
Bangalore
Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...
,
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. In 1986, he completed his M.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. As one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), it is recognized as an Institute of National Importance and has be ...
. He later enrolled in the doctoral program at the
University of Ottawa
The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottawa ...
, Canada, and received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1989
while working under the direction of Morris Goldberg.
Academic career
After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa in 1989, Panchanathan stayed on at Ottawa as an assistant professor and was later promoted to associate professor in 1994 after receiving tenure.
Panchanathan moved to Arizona in 1997 as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at
ASU.
In 2001, he was promoted to full professor and founded the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC),
which is focused on designing technologies and devices for assisting individuals with disabilities. He also founded and led the School of Computing and Informatics (2006-2009) and the Department of Biomedical Informatics (2005-2007).
Panchanathan was appointed as the university Chief Research Officer in 2009, where he was responsible for conceptualizing and building large interdisciplinary initiatives at ASU.
In 2011, he was promoted to Senior Vice President of ASU's Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development, for the advancement of research, entrepreneurship, innovation and economic development activities.
In 2016, Panchanathan was promoted to Executive Vice President, ASU Knowledge Enterprise Development and Chief Research and Innovation Officer at ASU. In this role, Dr. Panchanathan leads the advancement of research, innovation, entrepreneurship, corporate engagement and strategic partnerships, and international development. Under his leadership, ASU's research has grown exponentially, with annual research expenditures quadrupling to more than half a billion dollars over the past 15 years. Continuing on its path as a rapidly growing research enterprise, Arizona State University reported $635 million in research expenditures for fiscal year 2018, up from $545 million in FY17, according to a recent report by the U.S. National Science Foundation. At that time, ASU was holding its rank at No. 44 for total research expenditures in the U.S., remaining ahead of the California Institute of Technology and the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
. Among institutions without a medical school, ASU ranked No. 8, ahead of Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon University. In a 2017 Brazilian Congress of Industry Innovation panel discussion, Panchanathan highlighted how universities like ASU ought to work hand-in-hand with businesses to create curriculum that fosters the entrepreneurial traits employers look for today, in order to produce a future of innovation ecosystems. On October 22, 2019, Panchanathan testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Oceans, Fisheries, and Weather in a hearing titled, "Research and Innovation: Ensuring America's Economic and Strategic Leadership," examining the role that research and innovation play in ensuring U.S. leadership in the global economy.
National Science Foundation
On June 13, 2014, Panchanathan was nominated by President
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
as a member of the
National Science Board
The National Science Board (NSB) of the United States establishes the policies of the National Science Foundation (NSF) within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the President and the Congress. The NSB also serves as an ind ...
of
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
.
On December 19, 2019, President
Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pe ...
announced his intent to nominate Panchanathan to replace France Córdova as Director of the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
.
On June 18, 2020, he was unanimously confirmed by the US Senate as the new Director of the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
. He assumed office on June 23, 2020.
Research interests
His research interests include Human-centered Multimedia Computing (HCMC),
assistive and rehabilitative technologies,
haptic user interfaces, face/gait analysis and recognition, medical image processing, media processor designs and ubiquitous computing environments for enhancing quality of life for individuals with disabilities.
His research contributions have been disseminated in over 425 papers in various refereed journals and conferences and edited more than 30 book and book chapters.
He is recognized as a leader in the field of human-centered computing and informatics and has an h-index of 46with over 8000 citations. He also mentored over 100 students and scholars, which include graduate students, post-docs, research engineers and research scientists.
He spoke on the importance of fostering a culture of innovation to solve grand challenges that society faces today in a 2017 TEDxASU presentation.
Personal life
Panchanathan is married to Dr. Sarada "Soumya" Panchanathan, who is a former clinical pediatrician at the Maricopa County Hospital and a former part-time biomedical informatics faculty member from both the
University of Arizona College of Medicine
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
, Phoenix, and from ASU.
Together they have two children.
Awards, appointments and fellowships
Advisor for Science and Technology to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey 2018.
* Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Membership for the National Academy of Inventors’ Board of Directors, 2018.
* Appointed to Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Board of Directors, 2018.
* Appointed to the
Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...
Technology Council, 2017–2018.
* Appointed to the National Academy of Inventors Board of Directors, 2017–2018.
* 20 People to Know in Arizona Education,
Phoenix Business Journal
American City Business Journals, Inc. (ACBJ) is an American newspaper publisher based in Charlotte, North Carolina. ACBJ publishes The Business Journals, which contains local business news for 44 markets in the United States, Hemmings Motor News ...
, 2017.
* COO of the Year
Phoenix Business Journal 2017.
* Distinguished Alumnus Award,
Indian Institute of Technology
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are central government owned public technical institutes located across India. They are under the ownership of the Ministry of Education of the Government of India. They are governed by the Institu ...
, Madras, 2017.
* Distinguished Alumnus Award, Alumni Association Awards of Excellence,
University of Ottawa
The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottawa ...
, Canada, 2017.
* AAAS Fellow, November 2017
* Governor's Innovator of the Year for Academia Award, Governor's Celebration of Innovation Awards, Information Technology Centric Assistive and Rehabilitative Environments (iCARE) for Individuals who are Blind and Visually Impaired, Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing, 2004.
* ASU Leadership Award, "Outstanding service and contributions to the ASU Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the School of Computing and Informatics", 2009.
* Academic Collaboration Award, Outstanding Contributions to Improving the lives of Individuals with Disabilities through the iCARE Research Project, ASU Disability Resources for Students, 2004.
* Best paper award, "Configurable Haptic Training System for Laparoscopy", at Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 16 Conference, CA, 2008.
* Canadian Advanced Technology Association (CATA) Best Graduate Thesis Award, Master's Thesis student Mr. Eric Chan, Toronto, 1994.
* Microsoft
Imagine Cup
Imagine Cup is an annual competition sponsored and hosted by Microsoft Corp. which brings together student developers worldwide to help resolve some of the world's toughest challenges. It is considered as "Olympics of Technology" by computer sc ...
2010 for CUbiC iCARE Note-Taker Project, World Finals in Touch and Tablet category, Warsaw, Poland, 2010.
* Appointed by President Barack Obama to the
U.S. National Science Board (NSB) in 2014 for a six-year term.
* Appointed by Hon. U.S. Secretary of Commerce
Penny Pritzker
Penny Sue Pritzker (born May 2, 1959) is an American billionaire businesswoman and civic leader who served as the 38th United States secretary of commerce in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. She was confirmed by a Senate vote of 97†...
to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE). Advisor to the Secretary on Advancing Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Workforce Development, Economic Development and Global Competitiveness, 2012–2016.
* Chair of the Council on Research at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and co-chair of the APLU National Task Force on Managing University Intellectual Property, 2016–2018.
* Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2009–present.
(IEEE).
* Fellow of the Society for Photo-optical Engineering (
SPIE
SPIE (formerly the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, later the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It ...
).
* Fellow of the
Canadian National Academy of Engineering.
* Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors
* Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science
Works
*
*
*
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* S. Panchanathan, S. Chakraborty, T. McDaniel, R. Tadayon, "Person-Centered Multimedia Computing: A New Paradigm Inspired by Assistive and Rehabilitative Applications," IEEE MultiMedia Magazine, Vol. 23, pp. 12–19, August 2016.
* S. Panchanathan, S. Chakraborty, T. McDaniel, "Social Interaction Assistant: A Person-Centered Approach to Enrich Social Interactions for Individuals With Visual Impairments," IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, Vol. 10(5), pp. 942–951, 2016.
* S. Chakraborty, V. Balasubramanian, and S. Panchanathan, "Adaptive Batch Mode Active Learning," IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), Vol. 26(8), pp. 1747–1760, 2015.
* S. Chakraborty, V. Balasubramanian, Q. Sun, S. Panchanathan, and J. Ye, "Active Batch Selection via Convex Relaxations with Guaranteed Solution Bounds," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 37(10), pp. 1945–1958, 2015.
* S. Panchanathan, and T. McDaniel, "Person-centered accessible technologies and computing solutions through interdisciplinary and integrated perspectives from disability research," International Journal Universal Access in the Information Society – Special Issue on User Experience and Access using Augmented and Multimedia Technologies, Vol. 14(3), pp. 415–426, 2014.
* V. Balasubramanian, S. Chakraborty and S. Panchanathan, "Conformal Predictions for Information Fusion," Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 74, (1–2), pp. 45–65, 2014.
* S. Chakraborty, V. Balasubramanian, S. Panchanathan, "Generalized Batch Mode Active Learning for Biometric Recognition" accepted for publication Pattern Recognition Journal, Elsevier, 2013.
* R. Chattopadhyay, Z. Wang, W. Fan, I. Davidson, S. Panchanathan, J. Ye, "Batch Mode Active Sampling based on Marginal Probability Distribution Matching," Invited Paper. Accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD) - Special Issue on the Best of SIGKDD, 2013.
* S. Panchanathan, T. McDaniel, V. Balasubramanian, "An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Design, Development and Deployment of Person-Centered Accessible Technologies," Invited Keynote Paper. Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology (ICRTIT), 2013.
* S. Panchanathan, T. McDaniel, V. Balasubramanian, "Person-centered accessible technologies: Improved usability and adaptation through inspirations from disability research," in Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on User Experience in e-Learning and Augmented Technologies in Education, 2012.
* R. Chattopadhyay, Q. Sun, W. Fan, I. Davidson, S. Panchanathan, and J. Ye, "Multi-Source Domain Adaptation and Its Application to Early Detection of Fatigue," ACM Trans. on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 2012.
* R. Chattopadhyay, M. Jesunathadas, B. Poston, M. Santello, J. Ye, and S. Panchanathan, "A Subject-Independent Method for Automatically Grading Electromyographic Features during a Fatiguing Contraction," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 59(6), pp. 1749, 2012.
* S. Kumar, C. Konikoff, B. Van Emden, C. Busick, K. Davis, S. Ji, L. Wu, T. Brody, J. Ye, S. Panchanathan, T. Karr, K. Gerold, M. McCutchan, and S. Newfeld, "Flyexpress: Visual Mining Of Spatiotemporal Patterns for Genes and Publications in Drosophila Embryogenesis," Bioinformatics, Vol. 27(23), pp. 3319–3320, 2011.
* J. Rosenthal, N. Edwards, D. Villanueva, S. Krishna, T. McDaniel, and S. Panchanathan, "Design, Implementation, and Case Study of a Pragmatic Vibrotactile Belt," IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 60(1), pp. 114–125, 2011.
* S. Chakraborty, V. Balasubramanian and S. Panchanathan, et al. "On the Results of the First Mobile Biometry (MOBIO) Face and Speaker Verification Evaluation". Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 6388, pp. 210 – 225, 2010.
* L. Gade, S. Krishna, and S. Panchanathan, "Person Localization in a Wearable Camera Platform Towards Assistive Technology for Social Interactions," Special Issue of Media Solutions that Improve Accessibility to Disabled Users, Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Journal, Vol. 5, pp. 52–69, 2010.
* M. Vankipuram, K. Kahol, A. McLaren, and S. Panchanathan, "A Virtual Reality Simulator for Orthopedic Basic Skills: A Design and Validation Study," Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Vol. 43(5), pp. 661–668, 2010.
* N. C. Krishnan, D. Colbry, C. Juillard and S. Panchanathan, "Recognition of Hand Movements Using Wearable Accelerometers," Special Issue on Wearable Computing, Journal of Ambient Intelligent and Smart Environments, Vol. 1(2), pp. 143–155, 2009.
* S. Panchanathan, N. Krishnan, S. Krishna, T. McDaniel, V. Balasubramanian, "Enriched human-centered multimedia computing through inspirations from disabilities and deficit-centered computing solutions," in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Human-Centered Computing, 2008, pp. 35–42.
* R. Greenes, and S. Panchanathan, "Biomedical Informatics in the Desert–A New and Unique Program at Arizona State University," IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, pp. 150–156, 2008.
* D. Homa, K. Kahol, P. Tripathi, L. Bratton and S. Panchanathan, "Haptic Concepts in the Blind," Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, Vol. 71(4), pp. 690–698, 2008.
* K. Kahol, M. Leyba, M. Deka, V. Deka, S. Mayes, M. Smith, J. Ferrara, and S. Panchanathan, "Effect of Fatigue on Psychomotor and Cognitive Skills," American Journal of Surgery, Vol. 195 (2), pp. 195–204, 2008.
*
*
References
External links
ASU Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development
{{DEFAULTSORT:Panchanathan, Sethuraman
1961 births
Living people
American people of Indian Tamil descent
Arizona State University faculty
IIT Madras alumni
Indian Institute of Science alumni
Scholars from Tamil Nadu
University of Ottawa alumni
Engineers from Tamil Nadu
United States National Science Foundation officials
Indian expatriate academics
Indian emigrants to the United States
People from Chennai
University of Madras alumni
Trump administration personnel
Biden administration personnel
Indian American
American people of Indian descent