Pramod K. Varshney, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science, will receive the 2021 Pioneer Award from the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS).

Awarded annually since 1949, the award is one of the most distinguished awards in the field of electronics and aerospace systems, recognizing significant contributions to the creation of systems that still exist today. Contributions for which the award is given must have been made at least 20 years prior to the year of the award.

The 2021 award will recognize Varshney’s contributions to signal processing and information fusion enabling advanced aerospace and electronic systems. Varshney will receive the award at the IEEE Radar 2022 conference March 21-25 in New York.

“Professor Varshney was a pioneer in the field of complex information processing who made countless contributions during his career. The Pioneer Award rightly recognizes that some of his inventions paved the way for the rapid evolution of today’s technologies,” says Ramesh Raina, Acting Vice President for Research.

Varshney has also been selected to receive the prestigious 2021 Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for his outstanding contributions in the fields of distributed inference and data fusion.

“Within a few months, Dr. Varshney has won two prestigious awards from two different IEEE societies. Such a feat is totally unprecedented. He won the 2021 Shannon-Nyquist Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the 2021 IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) Pioneer Award. The EECS Department is incredibly proud of the accomplishments and recognitions it truly deserves,” said Jae C. Oh, Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).