Bhaskar Ramamurthi obtained his B.Tech in Electronics Engineering from IIT Madras in 1980 and his M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He was awarded the University of California Regents Fellowship during his doctoral studies. After obtaining his doctorate, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs for two years before joining the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras in 1986, where he is now the director. He served as the Dean of Planning at IIT Madras before taking over the role of director in September 2011.

His research interests are on topics in modulation and coding for mobile communications, wireless communication networks and design and implementation of wireless local loop systems. He is one of the founding members of the Telecommunications and Computer Networking Group (TeNeT) group at IIT Madras. He is the principal architect of corDECT wireless local loop system and Broadband corDECT Wireless DSL System, widely deployed in India and 15 countries. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering since 2000. He was elected as a Fellow of IEEE, effective from January 2015.

Awards and honours

• Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, from 2000
• Honorary Director of the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology
• Honorary Fellow of the International Medical Sciences Academy
• Vasvik Award for Electronic Sciences and Technology, 2000
• Tamil Nadu Scientist Award for Engineering and Technology, 2003
• India Semiconductor Association TechnoVisionary Award, 2011
• Doyens of Madras Award, 2014
• IEEE Fellow, from 1 January 2015
• RWTH Honorary Fellow Award from RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, February 2020