Sankaran received a BE in electrical engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata and an MS in control systems from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has worked in the industry for more than 30 years, including IBM and BHEL R&D, in India; and Westinghouse, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Duke Power in the USA. Sankaran’s interests focus on industry research, power plant training simulators and industry-academic relations. He was Senior Professor and Associate Dean at IIIT Bangalore before moving on to corporate IT consulting for Daimler Chrysler, Infineon, Yahoo and SAP Labs. Sankaran received the Society for Computer Simulation’s Industry Technology Award in 1992 for his work on the EPRI Mobile Training Simulator.
A senior member of the IEEE (M’91, SM’99), Sankaran served in the IEEE Bangalore Section, rising to chairman (2002-2003). He served as membership development chair for Region 10 (2004-2006). He helped to revive the Bangalore Computer Society Chapter in 2008. He served the Computer Society as Vice President of Chapters Activities in 2009 and as Vice President of the new Computer Society Member and Geographic Activities Board in 2010, and again in 2012. He served the IEEE MGA Board as TAB representative in 2013 and currently serves IEEE EAB as member of the Faculty Resources Committee in 2017. He received the IEEE Millennium Medal and was also conferred the Golden Core Member of the Computer Society in 2010, among several other recognitions.