Electrical engineering professor Viktor Prasanna will receive a 2009 Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award from Pennsylvania State University on April 27, 2009, in a ceremony on the Penn State campus.  

Viktor Prasanna

Each year, Penn State’s College of Engineering honors the professional achievements of a select group from more than 75,000 living graduates.  Prasanna received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1983 and joined USC later that same year.

“I was thrilled to hear about it,” Prasanna said.  “It’s exciting for me to go back to the campus where I was 25 years ago. I look forward to it."

He said he never would have imagined in his student days that he would be receiving this honor. “It was a humble beginning, very different from what I am doing now,” he said. “USC provided me with a great opportunity to grow, and looking back, I did not imagine that at all in those days as a graduate student.”   

Prasanna holds the Charles Lee Powell Chair in Engineering and is a member of the Computer Engineering Group (CENG) within the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, where he conducts research on parallel and distributed computing architectures and algorithms.  

Prasanna also serves as co-director of the newly-established Center for Research and Education in Advanced Software Technologies (CAST), funded by Infosys Technologies, and has received many other awards and honors for his research.

Alexander ‘Sandy’ Sawchuk, systems chair of the Ming Hsieh Electrical Engineering faculty, said, “Viktor has many notable accomplishments in computer engineering research, and our faculty joins me in congratulating him for this recognition of his achievements."