Harish Krishnaswamy
Even as many Indians are starting to enjoy the joys of 4G/LTE mobile data connections, scientists are racing to make the next generation 5G connections a reality. While 3G connections gave us download speeds of 250-500 KB per second, 4G connections are giving us speeds ranging anywhere from 10 MB to 100 MB. When 5G connections become available at the end of this decade, it is likely to provide speeds from 10 gigabytes to 1 terabyte per second. One of the key people making this a reality is Harish Krishnaswamy, an associate professor at Columbia University, New York. He has a BTech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; a master’s and a doctorate in the same discipline from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He joined the electrical engineering department of the Columbia University in 2009 and is currently leading some pioneering research there for which he has received awards like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty award and an IBM Faculty award. Krishnaswamy’s most groundbreaking work yet could be in making it commercially viable to make tiny nano-scale integrated circuits that can both receive and transmit simultaneously making our phones, tablets,watches and any future connected devices super powerful.