Dr. Ramesh Rao has been a faculty member at UC San Diego since 1984 and the Director of the Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego’s division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), since 2001. In 2004, he was appointed the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Prior to his current position, Dr. Rao was the Director of UCSD's Center for Wireless Communications (CWC).

Dr. Rao is involved on a day-to-day basis with a wide variety of research initiatives at the Qualcomm Institute. He leads several major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. He has been a PI on dozens of federal-, state-, foundation- and industry-funded grants, including the NIH-funded Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD), Self-Scaling Systems for Mass Casualty Management (WIISARD SAGE), and the Multimedia Telemedical Diagnostic System (STRokE DOC), the NSF-funded Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE) and ResponSphere projects, multiple projects involving cognitive networking, as well as leading several international collaborations. He has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed technical papers on a wide range of research topics in wireless communications including architectures, protocols, performance analysis of computer and communication networks, adaptive systems, energy-efficient communications, disaster management applications and health-related applications, among others. He is currently engaged in numerous projects to bridge emerging technologies with medicine and healthcare and investigating the power of utilizing information technologies to enhance, even transform, healthcare resources, knowledge bases, and outcomes.