1981 - B.Tech - Electrical Engineering Founder and Executive Director @ Climate Healers, Danville, CA, USA
Dr. Sailesh Krishna Rao obtained his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1981, his M.S. from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, CA, USA.
For the first twenty years after education, Sailesh was primarily involved in the creation of new communications technologies in support of the Internet revolution. During this phase, he worked at AT&T Bell laboratories, and was the founder and President of Silicon Design Experts, Inc. where he led the specification and development of the world’s first single-chip real time MPEG video encoder. He was also the founder and CTO of Phyten Technologies. Dr. Sailesh’s technical contributions have been path-breaking. During 1996-1999, he developed the Gigabit Ethernet on Copper standard, 1000BASE-T, which is deployed in internet datacenters and computers even today. He has made over 50 standards contributions to the ATM Forum and IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD Working group. He has 10 US patents and 3 Canadian patents and won the Intel Principal Engineer award in 2003. He has won 5 Exceptional Contribution awards from AT&T Bell Labs and also received the AT&T Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff Award in 1990.
In 2005, while watching a presentation by former Vice President, Al Gore, Sailesh became deeply alarmed by the global environmental crisis and has since devoted his time to this cause. He founded Climate Healers, a non-profit organization established with an objective facilitate re-forestation while minimizing fossil fuel use for cooking and lighting systems in low-income neighborhoods throughout the world. His recent book, “Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies”, calls on us to undo the damage done by the human species in its present Caterpillar stage of existence. In 2008, he received the Karamveer Puraskaar Global Indian Award presented by the Indian Confederation of NGOs.
In recognition of Dr. Sailesh Krishna Rao’s technical excellence and contributions towards environmental solutions, IIT Madras and its alumni are proud to confer on him this award.
