Viktor K. Prasanna (V. K. Prasanna Kumar) is Charles Lee Powell Chair in Engineering and is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and serves as the director of the Center for Energy Informatics (CEI). He is an associate member of the Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences (CAMS). He leads the Integrated Optimizations (IO) efforts at the USC-Chevron Center of Excellence for Research and Academic Training on Interactive Smart Oilfield Technologies (CiSoft) at USC and the demand response optimizations in the LA Smart Grid project. His research interests include High-Performance Computing, Parallel and Distributed Systems, Reconfigurable Computing, Cloud Computing, and Smart Energy Systems. He received his BS in Electronics Engineering from the Bangalore University, MS from the School of Automation, Indian Institute of Science, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University.

Prasanna has published extensively and consulted for industries in the above areas. He is the Steering Committee Co-Chair of the International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) [merged IEEE International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS) and Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (SPDP)]. He is the Steering Committee Chair of the International Conference on High-Performance Computing (HiPC). In the past, he has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and the Proceedings of the IEEE. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and the ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems. During 2003-’06, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the founding chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC).

Prasanna received the W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2015 for his contributions to reconfigurable computing. He received an Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award from the Pennsylvania State University in 2009 and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University Visveswaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) of Bangalore University in 2017. He was appointed Distinguished Professor, Beihang University (BUAA), Beijing, PRC, in 2018. He received a 2019 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He received the 2010 Distinguished Service Award from the IEEE Computer Society. He has received best paper awards at several international forums including ACM Computing Frontiers (CF), IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD), International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS), IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switches and Routers (HPSR), among others. His work on regular expression matching received one of the most significant papers in FCCM during its first 20 years award in 2013. He is a recipient of the 2005 Okawa Foundation Grant. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS).