In her own words "It is the quest for an opportunity to play significant and fundamental roles in shaping the creation, transmission and delivery of information anywhere on the face of this planet and beyond" that brought Prathima Agrawal to Telcordia Technologies after two decades of path breaking work at Bell Laboratories.

After receiving her BE and ME degrees in electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, Prathima completed her PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

As the head of networked computing research department, Prathima, along with her fellow researchers, invented a multiprocessor architecture, known as MARS (microcomputer architecture for rapid simulations) for designing large and complex VLSI circuits accurately and efficiently. This system helped establish AT&T’s ASIC business by supporting a ‘right the first time’ reputation in the market place. MARS systems were deployed in AT&T/Lucent Microelectronics for design verification and testing of hundreds of large and complex production chips with over a million transistors. The flexibility and cost advantages of MARS over commercial accelerators earned it the company’s 1994 CAE Product of the Year Award.

After having worked in every possible avtar of Bell Laboratories, Prathima is now the assistant vice president of Internet Architecture Research Laboratory and executive director of Computer Networking Research Department at Telcordia Technologies. During her illustrious career spanning over decades, Prathima has to her credit some 30 articles in refereed journals and periodicals as well as over 100 papers in conference proceedings. She also holds 24 US patents.

Patents apart, there has been no dearth of accolades for this lady. She was elected an IEEE Fellow in 1989 and a Fellow of Institution of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineers of India in 1986. She also served as an advisor, under the United Nations Development Program to the Indian Telephone Industries. n