Ramkrishna Pasumarthy

Timeline

1. 1999–2006

   Engineering degrees and a Twente PhD

   He earns a BTech with honors in electrical engineering at Bhilai Institute of Technology in 1999 and an MTech in electrical engineering at VJTI, Mumbai, in 2001. He completes a PhD in systems and control at the University of Twente in 2006.

2. 2010

   Postdocs and BITS Pilani

   He holds postdoctoral positions at the University of Melbourne and UCLA. In January 2010, he becomes an assistant professor at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

3. June 2011

   Joining IIT Madras

   He joins the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras in June 2011. His research covers modeling and control of complex physical systems in the port-Hamiltonian framework.

4. 2018

   Reinforcement learning for mechanical systems

   In January 2018, he coauthors "Tracking and Stabilization of Mechanical Systems using Reinforcement learning" with S Bhuvaneswari, B Ravindran and Arun Mahindrakar for the Indian Control Conference at IIT Kanpur. In July 2018, he coauthors "On the primal-dual dynamics of Support Vector Machines" with Krishna Chaitanya Kosaraju and Shravan Mohan for the International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems.

5. June 2021

   Controllability of brain circuits

   In June 2021, he coauthors a Nature Communications paper with Weidong Cai, Srikanth Ryali, Viswanath Talasila and Vinod Menon on dynamic causal brain circuits during working memory. The authors apply system identification, network science, stability analysis and control theory, and find that salience network nodes show the highest functional controllability.

6. April 2023

   Information transfer in networks

   In April 2023, he coauthors a Scientific Reports paper with Moirangthem Sailash Singh, Umesh Vaidya and Steffen Leonhardt. It shows that designing or reconfiguring a network's topology can optimize the information transfer between two chosen nodes, and applies the method to brain networks.

7. 2023

   Autonomous driving with Deep Q-Networks

   In 2023, he coauthors "End-to-end Autonomous Driving in Heterogeneous Traffic Scenario Using Deep Reinforcement Learning" with Soumyajit Chakraborty, Subhadeep Kumar and Nirav Bhatt for the European Control Conference. The paper builds a reinforcement learning agent with Deep Q-Networks that makes driving decisions directly from sensor data and tests it in the highway-env simulator.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor and program chair

   He is a professor at IIT Madras, affiliate faculty of RBCDSAI, the Robert Bosch center for data sciences and AI there, and Program Chair of the BS in DS & AI at IIT Madras Zanzibar. He has set up a cloud computing lab that focuses on building process plant simulators and cluster analysis on big data.