Ramesh Rao is the Director of the University of California, San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego . In 2004, he was appointed the first holder the QUALCOMM Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. Prior to becoming the Calit2 UCSD division director in 2001, Prof. Rao served as the director of UCSD's Center for Wireless Communications (CWC).

In addition to directing Calit2 UCSD, Prof. Rao is involved on a day-to-day basis with a wide variety of interdisciplinary and collaborative research initiatives, leading several major projects at Calit2. He has been a lead investigator on dozens of major federal-, state-, foundation- defense- and industry-funded grants, including the NIH-funded Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD) and the Multimedia Telemedical Diagnostic System (StrokeDoc), and the NSF-funded Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE) and ResponSphere projects.

His research interests include architectures, protocols, performance analysis of computer and communication networks, adaptive systems, energy-efficient communications, disaster management applications and health-related applications, among others; he has published extensively on these topics. He has authored more than 225 peer- reviewed technical papers in journals and major conference proceedings, contributed half a dozen book chapters, conducted short courses and delivered numerous invited talks and plenary lectures.

For his leadership in wireless communications, Dr. Rao was recently awarded the status of IEEE Fellow. He has twice been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Rao is a Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) and is the chair of the CCST's Personalized Health Information Technology Task Force ("pHIT"). He is also on the advisory council to the California Telehealth Network. In addition, he is on the Board of Directors of CommNexus San Diego: A Network of Communications Companies.

He has consulted extensively for government agencies and also provided consulting services to industry. He chaired the National Research Council's (NRC) Committee on Using Information Technology to Enhance Disaster Management, the findings were published by the NRC in 2007: "Improving Disaster Management: The Role of IT in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery." He also served on a U.S. government panel to review the current status of research, development, and applications in wireless communications in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe with a view towards evaluating the competitive status of U.S. efforts. He participates in many other technical, academic and industry organizations, boards, councils and committees. Prior to leading Calit2 UCSD, he was the Vice Chair of Instructional Affairs in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1984, and M.S. in 1982, both from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He earned his undergraduate BE degree with honors in electronics and communications in 1980 from the Regional Engineering College of the University of Madras in Tiruchirappalli, India. In 2008, the National Institute of Technology (NITT), Tiruchirappalli, awarded him their Distinguished Alumnus Award.