Mahesh K. Varanasi received the B.E. degree in electronics and communications engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India, in 1984 and the  M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University, Houston, TX, USA, in 1987 and 1989, respectively.

Since 1989, he has been a member of the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA, where he is a full Professor of  Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering since 2001.  He has been a Professor (by courtesy) of the  Department of Mathematics since 2010  and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of  Applied Mathematics since 2013.  His research and teaching interests are in the areas  of network communication and information theory, wireless communication  and coding, statistical inference and learning theory, and signal processing.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Highly Cited Researcher according to the ISI Web of Science. He was an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications during 2007–2009 and is currently Associate Editor for Communications in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.