ADELPHI, Md. -- A U.S. Army Research Laboratory scientist was recently awarded a Meritorious Presidential Rank Award for sustained accomplishment for his contributions in the field of network and information sciences to include signal processing, wireless communications and networking for Soldiers.
Dr. Ananthram Swami, ARL Fellow and senior research scientist, or ST, for network science, received the award at a ceremony held June 25 at the Pentagon hosted by Army Secretary Mark T. Esper.
The Presidential Rank Award is one of the highest awards bestowed to the Career Senior Executive Service and Senior Professional and Scientific-Professional by the President of the United States.
Two categories of rank awards are available, Distinguished rank to leaders who achieve sustained extraordinary accomplishments, and Meritorious rank to leaders for sustained accomplishments, which only five percent of SES senior professionals earn.
"It was really great to receive the award from the Secretary of the Army and to have family, friends and colleagues with me at the event," Swami said. "It was also an honor to be with all the other accomplished awardees."
According to Swami, he is thrilled to have received this award and is grateful for the support he has from ARL and the other organizations he collaborates with.
"It is nice to be recognized for a body of work, but it is really a recognition of the work done by a team of scientists and engineers," Swami said. "I have been fortunate to have had opportunities to work with many brilliant scientists and engineers, both at ARL and other government agencies, universities and industry, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. ARL's Open Campus has facilitated these collaborations tremendously."
Before joining ARL, Swami held research positions with Unocal Corporation, the University of Southern California, CS-3 and Malgudi Systems.
He was a statistical consultant to the California Lottery, developed a MATLAB-based toolbox for non-Gaussian signal processing, and has held visiting faculty positions at Institut National Polytechnique, Toulouse, France, and currently at Imperial College, London.
Swami has published more than 450 journal and conference papers in the area of signal processing, communication networks, cyber security and network science.
He is a government lead in ARL's Collaborative Technology Alliance on Network Science, the US-UK International Technology Alliance in Distributed Analytics and Information Sciences, and the ARL Collaborative Research Alliance on the Internet of Battlefield Things, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Throughout his career, Swami has been inspired by the problems he has the ability to help solve and those who are there to work by his side, and hopes his work will have a lasting impact on the protection of our Warfighters on the battlefield.
"What inspires me the most about my work are the opportunities to work on hard problems with the best and the brightest, and to set research directions for the community," Swami said. "While impact is hard to measure beyond the usual metrics, I hope that I have been a good mentor to junior colleagues at ARL and at partner institutions with whom I have worked. I also hope that the research landscape that I have helped shape to some extent, proves to be fruitful for the Army."
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