UofM’s Dipankar Dasgupta selected prestigious National Academy of Inventors Fellow

Dec. 14, 2022 — Dr. Dipankar Dasgupta, director and William Hill professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Memphis, has been selected as a prestigious National Academy of Inventors Fellow for the Class of 2022.

Dasgupta is the third from the University of Memphis to be selected a NAI Fellow joining Dr. Hai Trieu in 2019 and Dr. Gary Bowlin in 2015.

The NAI Fellows Program was established to highlight the academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors.

The NAI Fellow program has 1,567 Fellows worldwide representing more than 300 prestigious universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes. Collectively, the Fellows hold more than 53,000 issued U.S. patents, which have generated more than 13,000 licensed technologies, 3,200 companies and created more than 1 million jobs. In addition, more than $3 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow discoveries.

“This year’s class of NAI Fellows represents a truly outstanding caliber of inventors,” said Dr. Paul R. Sanberg, FNAI, president of the NAI. “Each of these individuals have made significant impact through their work and are highly regarded in their respective fields. The breadth and scope of their inventions is truly staggering. I am excited to see their creativity continue to define a new era of science and technology in the global innovation ecosystem.”

Dasgupta will be one of 169 distinguished inventors to be NAI Fellows inducted at the NAI’s 12th annual meeting on June 27, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Dasgupta joined the University of Memphis as an assistant professor in 1997 and became a full professor in 2004. He is the recipient of the 2011-12 Willard R. Sparks Eminent Faculty Award, the highest distinction and most prestigious honor given to a faculty member by the UofM. Dasgupta currently holds the William Hill Professorship at the UofM. He is an IEEE Fellow, recipient of 2014 ACM SIGEVO Impact Award and ACM Distinguished Speaker. Dasgupta has been an advisory board member of the Geospatial Data Center (GDC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2010.

Dasgupta's research covers broad areas of computational intelligence (including AI and machine learning) for the design and development of intelligent secure solutions. He is one of the founding fathers of the field of artificial immune systems, making major contributions in developing tools for digital immunity and survivable systems. Some of Dasgupta’s groundbreaking words, like digital immunity, negative authentication and cloud insurance model, put his name in Computer World Magazine and other news media. He has more than 300 research publications in book chapters, journals and international conference proceedings; and has more than 20,000 citations (having scholar h-index of 65), according to Google Scholar indexing.

Dasgupta received external funding from different federal agencies including NSF, DARPA, IARPA, NSA, NA VY, ONR, DoD and DHS/FEMA. His patents on Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication and Multi-User Permission models have been receiving growing attention in IT industry for implementing zero-trust in cyber-enabled systems.