Lalitha Sankar is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University. She was an Assistant Professor at ASU from 2012 to 2016. Prior to that she was a Research Scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University working with H. Vincent Poor. She was also a Science and Technology Teaching and Research Fellow supported by the Council on Science and Technology at Princeton University.
She graduated with a Ph.D from Rutgers University, where she worked with Narayan Mandayam while collaborating with Gerhard Kramer (then at Bell Labs). Prior to that, Sankar was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Shannon Labs, Florham Park, NJ, where she worked on design, development and prototyping of next-generation wired and wireless systems such as multi-band software radios and DSL modems. This was preceded by a year developing signal processing algorithms for the first digital camera prototype developed at Polaroid Corporation Engineering R&D in Cambridge, MA. Lalitha has a master’s degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics is from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.
Lalitha Sankar is a recipient of the 2014 NSF CAREER award. She received the best paper award from the IEEE Globecom 2011 for her paper on side-information privacy with R. Tandon and H. V. Poor. For her doctoral work, she received the 2007-2008 Electrical Engineering Academic Achievement Award from Rutgers University.