Prof. Dr. E. G. Rajan

Ethirajan Govinda Rajan — known throughout his field as E. G. Rajan — has spent a working lifetime on a single question: how a machine can be taught to see, and to reason about what it sees. The answer he built, symbolic processing of signals and images, has carried him from a physics degree in Tiruchirappalli to academies of science in Moscow, Barcelona and Linz.

Born on 30 June 1950 in Tamil Nadu, he took a B.Sc. in Physics from Jamal Mohamed College, Madras University, in 1970, a diploma in Electronics Engineering from the Madras Institute of Technology, Chromepet, in 1974, and an M.E. in Applied Electronics from Madras University in 1983 — standing first in the university in Industrial Electronics. His Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Signal and Image Processing) came from IIT Kanpur in 1990, where his thesis drew Category 1 reports from Prof. A. G. Constantinides of Imperial College, London, and Prof. Claudio Moraga of the University of Dortmund.

He stayed at IIT Kanpur to teach, and was named Best Instructor of the Department of Electrical Engineering for two consecutive years, 1990–91 and 1991–92. Across roughly thirty years in teaching, research and administration he has supervised a long line of M.S. and Ph.D. scholars in India and abroad — more than a hundred doctoral students by his own count — and published widely in international journals on image segmentation, feature extraction, iris recognition, medical imaging, genomics and machine vision.

The institution-building runs alongside the science. He is Founder President of the Pentagram Research Centre (P) Ltd., Hyderabad, and the Pentagram group he leads reaches from India to Birmingham in the United Kingdom, North Carolina in the United States, Ontario in Canada and Accra in Ghana. He chairs the Hyderabad Institute of Analytics and Trigem Innovations, is Managing Trustee of the Institute of Ancient Philosophy, and advises SENSEACRE Labs, Cyber Vidyapeet and Galileo Innovations. His earliest work was of a different order altogether: a classified volume on the Electronic Order of Battle Records of military radars, published by the Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, in 1982, for which the Indian Navy issued a commendation.

Recognition has come from an unusually wide set of places. He was named a Distinguished Scientist and Man of the Millennium by Who’s Who Bibliographical Records, Cambridge, in 2000; he edits for AMSE at the Royal Academy of Doctors, Barcelona; he is a special invitee of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and of the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT; and in May 2025 he was elected a Foreign Full Member — Academician — of the Russian Academy of Engineering. He credits a moral science class at Sacred Heart High School in 1966 for the habit that underlies all of it: working, as he puts it, without expectations.