Faculty Profile: S. Sitharama Iyengar


This is the ninth article in a series highlighting some of the 124 faculty members who were hired during the 2011-2012 academic year

As a child growing up in Bangalore, India, S. Sitharama Iyengar learned to make the most of his opportunities, however limited they sometimes may have appeared.

His family was very poor, and his father, who worked as clerk, struggled to provide food for them.

“He could not help me financially, but God gave me good intelligence,” says Iyengar, now the Ryder Professor of Computer Science and chair of FIU’s School of Computing and Information Sciences. “I learned that I could use that intelligence to grow out of our poverty. My father told me when you do something you have to be the best. Don’t compromise your quality and hard work. Even if you are working as a clerk you should be the best clerk in town.”

After graduating from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, Iyengar came to the United States. He worked hard not only to provide for himself but also send money back to his family in India.

Iyengar earned his Ph.D. in 1974 from Mississippi State University, and worked as a visiting scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After two years at Jackson State University, he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University in 1979 as an assistant professor. He quickly made a name for himself at LSU, working his way up the academic ranks and bringing major research dollars to the school.

Iyengar became chair of the Department of Computer Science, and in 1985 established the Robotics Research Laboratory at LSU, where he also headed the Wireless Sensor Networks Laboratory. He directed more than 42 Ph.D. students and 100 Master’s students, many of whom are now either faculty at major universities or scientists and engineers at national labs around the world.

 Iyengar has published more than 400 research papers and has authored or co-authored 15 books. MIT Press will publish his most recent book, A Competitive Approach for Network Design Structures.”

A pioneer in the field of distributed sensor networks, computational aspects of robotics and oceanographic applications, Iyengar is best known for introducing novel data structures and algorithmic techniques for large scale computations in sensor technologies and image processing applications. His work has had significant impacts in buy-at-bulk network design problems, which further affect a wide range of practical applications including the areas of communication and transportation networks. He has also pioneered a universal technique for finding the Price of Anarchy of every bottleneck congestion game, extending the game theory to applications in network routing, scheduling and cloud computing.

Iyengar came to FIU in June 2011 and immediately went to work to improve the school’s national ranking and increase research funding. He wants to enhance the school’s reputation for the commercialization of ideas, patents and entrepreneurship. The school is in the process of hiring five new faculty members, and last spring launched a distinguished lecture series.

Today, Iyengar looks at his own children and thinks how far his family has come. His oldest son went to MIT and is now a professor and radiation oncologist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Another son graduated from Johns Hopkins University and is now an IT entrepreneur, and his youngest son is pursuing his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Duke University.

“There are a lot of people like me both here and everywhere else who are looking for opportunities to do things they may think they will not get a chance to do. We must provide opportunities for them,” he says. “If you look at my life you’ll see that nothing is impossible.”

Other faculty members profiled in this series:

Randall Upchurch

Tawia Ansah

David A. Ralston

Margaret Scisney-Matlock

Percy Hintzen

O. Dale Williams

Shekhar Bhansali

Hakan Yilmazkuday