Thyaga Nandagopal

Dr. Thyaga Nandagopal serves in the Directorate of Technology, Innovation and Partnershps (TIP). He is the Division Director for the Division of Innovation and Technology Ecosystems (ITE).  Prior to this role, he was the Deputy Division Director (DDD) for the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) in the CISE Directorate.  He was a program officer in this directorate from 2012 – 2017, where he managed wireless networking and mobile computing research within the Networking Technologies and Systems (NeTS) program at NSF.  He has been with the Foundation since February 2012.

Before joining NSF, Dr. Nandagopal spent 10 years as a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs/Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs. His research interests dealt with networking in the cloud, green networking, and software-defined networks. In this role, he helped pioneer the development of the first commercial carrier-grade software-defined network platform (ALU 9980 AINP) between 2006 and 2008, with industry-leading features such as service-chaining and network function virtualization. He also worked extensively on wireless ad hoc/mesh networks and sensors/RFID systems, with specific focus on algorithms for enabling efficient operations of these systems.

Dr. Nandagopal holds 38 US patents awarded and several patents pending, and has published numerous papers in highly regarded conferences and journals in the field. He has also served as program chair or co-chair for many technical program committees, and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Dr. Nandagopal is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Dr. Nandagopal holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); M.S. degrees in applied mathematics and computer engineering from UIUC; and a B.Eng. in electronics and communication engineering from Anna University (Chennai, India).