Vishwanath Saragadam, a postdoctoral research associate in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice, has received the Outstanding Postdoctoral Research Award from the George R. Brown School of Engineering.
The award recognizes a current Rice postdoc who has significantly contributed to a research program through publications, proposal writing or other work.
Saragadam, advised by C. Sidney Burrus Professor of ECE Richard G. Baraniuk and professor of ECE Ashok Veeraraghavan, is headed for a tenure-track position at the University of California, Riverside.
“Vishwa is an analytically gifted scholar, deep thinker and one of the most creative researchers we have had the pleasure of working with. He has that rare gift of being able to identify those uniquely interesting opportunities that lie at the intersection of multiple scientific disciplines,” Baraniuk said.
“Vishwa has significantly expanded his research program to have an innovative ‘yin-yang’ structure that exploits data and machine learning to enable new optical sensor designs and, conversely, uses optics to implement computationally intensive machine learning algorithms,” Veeraraghavan said.
Saragadam earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2016 and 2020, respectively. He joined Rice in 2020 and focuses his research on computational imaging that works toward combining new optics and sensors with new algorithms to solve hard problems in imaging and vision.
“An outstanding postdoc requires an outstanding team of mentors. In my case, it was the Rice ECE department faculty, in particular Baraniuk, Veeraraghavan and Ashutosh Sabharwal, ECE chair and Ernest Dell Butcher Professor of Engineering,” he said. “I would like to thank my wife Dhivya and my parents for their patience and support.”