Dinesh Rajan

Dinesh Rajan is the Mary and Richard Templeton Dean ad interim of SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering. A member of the SMU faculty since 2002, he has held a range of academic and administrative leadership roles at the University.

As chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2012 to 2022, he hired more than 10 faculty members, including multiple endowed professors, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and several junior faculty members. He later served as associate dean, contributing to schoolwide strategic decisions on faculty hiring and developed strategic partnerships to increase enrollment.

Rajan also helped advance Lyle’s online and experiential education programs. He directed technology enhancements supporting online instruction and ensured academic quality across the school’s online offerings. He has also helped to integrate experiential learning into the curriculum to connect classroom instruction with real-world applications.

Rajan’s research centers on the sensing, extraction, transmission and dissemination of information. His interdisciplinary work spans wireless networks, structural health monitoring, system optimization and computational imaging. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed technical articles, co-edited two books and co-authored one book. He also holds three issued patents. Rajan’s work has received support from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research and Army Research Laboratory, as well as companies including Toyota and Texas Instruments. He has served as technical program chair for international IEEE and COMSNETS conferences and has contributed to conference executive and technical committees and journal editorial boards.

Rajan received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for applying information theory to the design of mobile wireless networks. His honors also include selection as a Fulbright Specialist, the Ford Research Fellowship, SMU’s Golden Mustang Award and multiple teaching awards at SMU.

He earned a B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University.