Prof. Vijayakumar Bhagavatula is currently the Director of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Rwanda. He is also the U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU, Kigali,Rwanda, Africa.
Prof. Bhagavatula did his B.Tech and M.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1975 and 1977 respectively followed by a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1980. He joined as a faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 1982. He has served as interim dean for the College of Engineering and as an acting department head of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University.
Prof. Bhagavatula's research interests are in the fields of Automatic Target Recognition Algorithms, Biometric Recognition Methods and Coding and Signal Processing for Data Storage Systems. He served as a Pattern Recognition Topical Editor for the information processing division of Applied Optics.