Dr. Priya Ranjan (M’1997) is a distinguished professional with a robust academic background and a prolific career in the fields of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He graduated with an EE degree from IIT Kharagpur in 1997 and subsequently pursued M.S. (EE) and Ph.D. (ECE) degrees from the esteemed University of Maryland, College Park, USA, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. Throughout his academic journey, Dr. Ranjan was mentored by eminent scholars, including Prof. K.B. Dutta of EE-IITKGP and Prof. Soumitro Banerjee, a Bhatanagar Awardee, who introduced him to the realm of control theory and nonlinear dynamics.
Driven by a fervor for discovering novel ideas in control theory and applications, Dr. Ranjan embarked on a journey with the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), a DRDO lab, under the mentorship of Prof. M. Vidyasagar. His quest for knowledge led him to the Computer Aided Control Systems Engineering (CACSE) lab at the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland. Guided by Prof. E.H. Abed, he spent twelve transformative years at ISR, where his groundbreaking work received support from leading government funding agencies such as NSF and DARPA.
His research in nonlinear analysis of networking protocols took a non-conventional narrative, treating non-linearity as inherent in network technologies. Dr. Ranjan's work unveiled intricate interactions between system dynamics and delays, revealing a captivating canvas of behaviors in infinite dimensions. He pioneered the discovery of a constant that stands as the global stability limit in the presence of arbitrary delays, building upon the legacies of research luminaries like Kelley, Sharkovsky, Mallet-Paret, and Ivanov. This constant propels the understanding of more comprehensive and practical engineering scenarios.