In Chronological Order

Synopsis (with some highlights) of Ramesh Bhandari’s  Career

1.   Ramesh, as a 15 year old high school student, thought of on his own, created, and published a crossword puzzle “Science Crossword Puzzle (Physics)” in the December 1967 issue of “Science Reporter”, a monthly published by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India; the submission and subsequent publication of a science crossword puzzle was the first of its kind and a trailblazer, as the science magazine started thereafter to publish such items on a regular basis; Ramesh received a monetary award of Rs. 25 for his contribution.

2.   Ramesh generalized a mathematics problem posed in a mathematics olympiad, provided a formula for its solution, and published it in “Mathematics Student”, a mathematics journal published in India (see publication #29 in the publication list). Ramesh was 16 when he thought of its generalization and solution.

3.  While still a Physics Freshman (17 years old) in India, Ramesh was intrigued by the work of Victor Weisskopf, a famous Physics Professor at MIT, while reading a book on Special Theory of Relativity. Victor Weisskopf’s work centered on appearance of small, moving objects. Ramesh followed up with his own detailed investigation, and published his original and novel findings in the October 1970 issue of the American Journal of Physics (see publication #27).

Although the paper was published for the novelty of the results, one of the derived  mathematical results puzzled Ramesh, and remained an enigma in his mind until Ramesh reinvestigated the problem eight years later  (in his spare time) during his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie-Mellon University. He found the missing link to the puzzle, and published the physical interpretation of the cryptic mathematical result in a new paper in the American Journal of Physics (see publication # 28).

4.    Ramesh came to USA in 1973 and entered the graduate school of Carnegie-Mellon University as a teaching assistant (with tuition waiver) in the Physics Department. After working first under Prof. Richard Cutkosky (now deceased) and then under Prof. Lincoln Wolfenstein (member, National Academy of Sciences), he obtained his Ph.D. in particle physics in 1978, publishing under both the professors in two  different subfields of particle physics. He completed his thesis work with two papers within a year. 

5.    From 1978 to 1982, Ramesh was a post-doctoral research associate/visiting assistant professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (1978 –1982), where he simplified the process of particle scattering analysis for the research community by generating mathematical models amenable to analytic expressions (see publications # 16 and 22) and subsequently used them in the investigation of the new, controversial species of particles called dibaryons (see, e.g., publication # 23). This work was cited on a continuing basis for several years in the annual issue of Reviews of Particle physics.

6.   From Virginia Tech, Ramesh moved to New Mexico State University working first as a Visiting Assistant Professor and subsequently as a College Associate Professor. He remained there from 1982 – 1986, teaching as well as performing research.  In the first year, he detected and helped remove errors in the doctoral work of a graduate student (working under a different professor) to enable publication of the work (see publication # 15).

Because the Physics Department at New Mexico State University was developing a Center for Applied Optics, and laying huge emphasis on research in this area, Ramesh moved into this new area, focusing on  (classical) light scattering by aerosols (dielectric particles,especially of spherical shape). He learnt and mastered techniques on his own and  became a renowned expert  via rapid publications of  original work within refereed optics journals such as Applied Optics and Journal of Optical Society of America (see, e.g., publications # 12 and 14). His first paper in this new area was later selected and republished within the special (SPIE Milestone Series) volume of outstanding papers on Light Scattering. He became a resource, refereeing papers and research proposals submitted by peers.

Ramesh won research funding to support himself during the summers of 1985 and 1986, performing research as a guest visitor at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

7.    After spending a year at Clarkson University  (1986-1987) as a Research Associate Professor, where he developed computer models and codes to simulate light scattering by complex dielectric particles (see publication # 9), he entered the R&D sector of industry.

8.   In industry, he entered a radically different field of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging by joining a start-up “Research & Development Laboratories”, specializing in defense-related work. He quickly learnt the new field of SAR and made a technical breakthrough at a time when the company’s progress on the project was stalled, earning the respects of his peers and employers. He further successfully interpreted for the company the puzzling mathematical work of the late Physics Nobel Laureate, Julian Schwinger, then working as a consultant for the company. Within 5 months of joining, Ramesh received an unexpected salary increment and a package of stock options, and was made a core member of the company. Unfortunately, the company started to become unstable on account of funding cuts, and he resigned after a year of employment to join Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1988.

9.    At Bell Labs, he first worked on nuclear-weapon effects on telecommunications, an area he was hired into. As the external funding for this project started to dry up following the collapse of communism in Europe and the subsequent warming up of relations between the East and the West, Ramesh switched to main stream work within Bell Labs, working in the areas of network planning, design, and performance.

a) His first task was to enhance the survivability of AT&T’s vast network (against node and link failures) via development and application of diverse routing algorithms. As again, he took this assigned task as a challenge. Being new to this field, and further constrained by deadlines which left very little time for investigation and understanding of existing published literature, he quickly comprehended the basic principles involved in the algorithm construction process and constructed his own simplified versions, followed by innovative extensions for the complicated AT&T fiber network.

On account of the massive amount of algorithm work performed by Ramesh and his software team, Ramesh became a resource for the entire AT&T Bell Laboratories on the use and application of these diverse routing algorithms and the developed codes. An invited story on his work was published in AT&T Technical Report.  He presented and published his work in international conferences with several of his papers receiving recognition and getting translated into Hungarian.

Recognizing this work would be useful to the communications community at large, Ramesh undertook to write a book on the subject of diverse routing algorithms. The book titled “Survivable Networks: Algorithms for Diverse Routing” was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers (later acquired by Springer Verlag) in late 1998.  Being a valuable resource (although only a 200-page book), it was initially priced at $110.00. However, because of its popular demand, the publisher raised the price to $121.00, and then to $138.00, and is currently listed at $159.00 (although used and  new books (with discounts) are available at much lower price (see, e.g., www.amazon.com). This book has receicved high acclaim and was listed  as one of the top 20 books to possess within the area of telecommunication sciences. According to Google Scholar, the  book has been cited abut 800 times. 

b) Another significant piece of research centered on teletraffic engineering of circuit-switched voice networks, a completely new technical area for Ramesh.  Ramesh reproduced the complex teletraffic routing algorithms for the AT&T’s International Network from the C-programming codes (not understood by his peers), and recognized in the process the modeling inadequacies. Motivated by a need to find the correct solutions, Ramesh developed an original model, which was published (see publication # 5) and later became a part of the international standard (ITU-T Recommendation E.524) on teletraffic engineering techniques.

c) During the turbulent times within the Bell Labs system, Ramesh moved to Lucent, where, during his brief tenure of a year, he made significant contributions towards optical product development by detecting and correcting critical technical errors in implemented algorithms, resulting in true robustness of the final product.

10. At the Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, a federal laboratory, Ramesh invented a new species of rerouting algorithms, called the  Sliding Shortest Path Algorithms to solve a difficult problem in the area of constrained routing in networks. This original work on a novel problem (not addressed before) was presented and published as a series of papers (publications # 9-14) in the proceedings of international conferences on graph theory and combinatorial optimization. A patent (US 8,233,397 B1) on this work was granted by the US Patent & Trademark Office on July 31, 2012.

In 2011,  he moved into Quantum Cryptography (also referred to as Quantum-Key-Distribution (QKD)), a radical shift from the previous area of graph theory applied to networks. His accomplishements include the successful interpretation of the security proof of the BB84 protocol documented in a 90-page pedagogical report; the work involved the in-depth understanding and applications of classical linear codes and the quantum-error-codes of Calderbank, Shor, and Steanne. Ramesh was subsequnetly invited by Springer publishers to publish the tutorial as a minibook with monetary compensation, but federal government constraints prevented its publication.

11. At the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, another federal laboratory, where he currently works, Ramesh entered the hot field of orbital angular momentum (OAM) mode propagation in an optical fiber, developing expertise rapidly and publishing papers with groundbreaking perturbation techniques to understand the impact of fiber imperfections on OAM mode propagation.