Vellenki Umapathi Reddy received BE, MTech and PhD from Osmania University, IIT Kharagpur and the University of Missouri, respectively. He held a brief assignment with Bell Laboratories, Holmdel (1970) and University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago (1971-72) before joining IIT Madras as an Assistant Professor in 1972. He moved to IIT Kharagpur in 1976 as a Professor of Radar and Communication. He was Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University (1979-82). Thereafter, He worked at the Osmania University as Professor/Project Director of Research & Training Unit for Navigational Electronics (1982-88). He then moved to Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore as Professor of Electrical Communication Engineering. After retiring from IISc in 2001, he held positions as CTO (2001-03) & Chief Scientist with Hellosoft India Pvt. Ltd (2006-08), Microsoft Chair Professor (2003-05) and Institute Professor (2007-2010) with IIIT, Hyderabad, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus), with CR Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, UOH Campus, Hyderabad (2010-2012) and Honorary Professor, with IIT, Hyderabad (2013-) . During 1988-99, he held several visiting appointments with the Stanford University, the University of Iowa and the Research Centre Imarat at Hyderabad.

Academic and Research Achievements: Reddy's research contributions cover development of algorithms for adaptive subspace estimation and their convergence analysis which are basic to adaptive super-resolution spectral estimation techniques, both temporal and spatial, and find applications in target tracking and source localization; analysis of direction-of-arrival estimation and beam-forming algorithms for narrowband and broadband signals, assuming un-correlated and correlated signals; analysis of finite data performance of high resolution algorithms with sensor gain and phase perturbations, and of MVDR (minimum-variance distortionless response) beam-former with and without spatial smoothing; analysis of spatial smoothing techniques and their extension to arbitrary and circular arrays; development of a sub-band adaptive filter structure without cross filters and its application to acoustic echo cancellation; optimum receiver for discrete multi-tone modulation with zero suffix and pre-detection equalizer; frame and carrier synchronization, and channel estimation in OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) based wireless communication system, physical layer design for 802.11a/b and 802.11n WLAN receiver; low complexity decoders for MIMO (multiple input multiple output) wireless communication system (four US patents have been granted in WLAN related system), signal design for MIMO radar, blind modulation classification for large class (11 class)  in Rayleigh flat fading channels in the presence of frequency and timing offsets  

Other Contributions: At Osmania University (1982-88), Reddy founded Research and Training Unit for Navigational Electronics, which is now a permanent research centre of the University. At IISc (1988-2001), he was instrumental in starting a biennial conference series on Signal Processing and Communications, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Chapter. At IIIT, Hyderabad, he started Wireless Research Communication Centre, and his group deployed 802.11 g based WLAN network in the campus. He served as Chairman, INSA National Committee for URSI (1997-2000) and Member of URSI Standing Committee on Developing Countries (1999-2002). He was on the Editorial boards of Indian Journal of Engineering and Materials Sciences (1995-98) and Proceedings of the IEEE (2000-01).

Awards and Honours: Professor Reddy received the SK Mitra Memorial Award from IETE (1989). He was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (1991), Indian National Academy of Engineering (1992), IEEE (1999) and the World Innovation Foundation (2003).