Who is Ashok Veeraraghavan? Indian-American professor honoured with Texas’ highest academic award

Who is Ashok Veeraraghavan? Indian-American Ashok Veeraraghavan has been awarded the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology (TAMEST), one of the state’s highest academic honors.

The Edith and Peter O'Donnell Awards honor rising Texas researchers who are addressing the essential roles, limitations, and potential of the brain

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Delighted to receive an award, Ashok Veeraraghavan said, "I am delighted to receive this award. It is the recognition of the wonderful and innovative research that many students, postdocs and research scientists, in the computational imaging lab at Rice University have done over the last decade."

"Currently, many imaging systems are constructed without considering all three elements simultaneously; they are developed independently," explained Veeraraghavan.

"Co-design introduces novel opportunities and enables us to attain certain imaging functionalities or performance capabilities that would otherwise be unattainable," he further elaborated.
Veeraraghavan’s research seeks to provide solutions for imaging scenarios where the visualization target is inaccessible to current imaging technologies due to the scattering of light in participating media.

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“There are many examples of this,” Veeraraghavan said. “One familiar example is when you’re driving a car and it’s foggy, so you can’t see too far out. In this case, fog acts as the scattering medium. If you’re doing satellite imaging, clouds can act as the scattering medium. And if you’re doing biological imaging, it’s skin that acts as the obscurant that makes it so you can’t see blood cells or the structure of the vascular system, for example.

Who is Ashok Veeraraghavan? 

• Ashok Veeraraghavan originates from Chennai, where he spent the majority of his early years before adulthood
• Ashok Veeraraghavan is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. 
• He received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002, and his master's and Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004 and 2008, respectively. 
• Ashok joined the ECE Department in 2010. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 and Professor in 2020
• Veeraraghavan is co-developer of FlatCam, a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in a traditional camera. 
• Veeraraghavan's computational imaging lab takes a comprehensive approach to researching imaging processes. They explore optics and sensor design alongside machine learning processing algorithms to address imaging challenges that may exceed the capabilities of existing technologies.

About Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award

The "O'Donnell Awards" typically refer to the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Awards, which are presented annually by The Academy of Medicine, Engineering & Science of Texas (TAMEST). These awards recognize outstanding achievements in science, medicine, and engineering in Texas.

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The awards include categories such as medicine, engineering, and science. They aim to highlight innovative research and its potential to impact society positively.

(With inputs from agencies)