Rajat Moona

Rajat Moona (born 1 November 1965) is the Director of Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar from 2022 onwards. He has also served as Director of Indian Institute of Information Technology, Vadodara on additional Charge Basis from 2023 till 2024. He has served as director at Indian Institute of Technology, Bhilai from 2017 to 2022. He was also a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur from 1991 to 2011 and Director General of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing from 2011 to 2017.

Early life
He completed his BTech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He earned his doctoral degree from the Department of Computer Science and Automation at Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, in 1989, under the supervision of Vaidyeswaran Rajaraman.

Work
He joined at IIT Kanpur as a faculty member in 1991. Between 1994 and 1995, he was a visiting scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later he was also associated with Mentor Graphics as Senior Engineering Manager. Here was involved in developing methods of translating software codes of electronic systems into hardware.

During his tenure at IIT Kanpur, he was involved in development of a smart card operating system for Electronic Passports. At C-DAC, he was instrumental on the SCOSTA compliant operating system development, and the technical improvements behind the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) in India and Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) that uses RFID.

Honor and awards

 * Indo-US Science and Technology Fellowship (1994)
 * Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair Professorship (2008)
 * VASVIK Industrial Research Award in Information and Communication Technology (2010)
 * National Award for Best Electoral Practices, Election Commission of India (2016, 2020-21)

Patents

 * Compiling memory dereferencing instructions from software to hardware in an electronic design (2004)
 * Methods and systems for secured access to devices and systems (2006)
 * Method and system for using personal devices for authentication and service access at service outlets (2009)