P. Vijay Kumar received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur and Kanpur, and the Ph.D. degree from USC in 1983, all in Electrical Engineering. From 1983 to 2003, he was on the faculty of the EE-Systems Department at USC.   Since 2003, he has been on the faculty of IISc Bengaluru.  In 2010-2017, he was an Adjunct Research Professor at USC and, from 2018-2020, a Visiting Professor at USC.  

His current research interests include codes for low-latency communication, codes for distributed storage, and low-correlation sequences for navigation satellite systems. He is a recipient of the 1995 IEEE Information Theory Society Prize-Paper award and the IEEE Data Storage Best Paper Award of 2011/2012.  A pseudorandom sequence family designed in a 1996 paper co-authored by him formed the short scrambling code of the 3G WCDMA cellular standard.  The Indian Space Research Organization will incorporate the IZ4 family of spreading codes co-designed by him into the new civilian L1 signal of the NavIC navigation satellite system.

He received the USC School of Engineering’s Senior Research Award in 1994, the Rustum Choksi Award for Excellence in Research in Engineering at IISc in 2013, and the 2017-22 J. C. Bose National Fellowship awarded by the Department of Science and Technology.  He was on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory (IT) Society in 2013-15, was a plenary speaker at ISIT 2014, a TPC Co-Chair of ISIT 2015, and is currently Chair (2019-2021) of the IT Society Conference Committee.  He is a Fellow of the INAE, IAS, and INSA Indian academies and a Fellow of IEEE.