Prof. Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Director of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), has been awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honours, in the Science and Engineering category as part of the 2026 Padma Awards announced on January 25, 2026. Dr. Kamakoti was instrumental in developing range of indigenously designed processors called SHAKTI in India.
The announcement, made ahead of Republic Day, includes Prof. Kamakoti among 113 Padma Shri recipients this year. He joined IIT Madras as a faculty member in 2001 and has served as Director since 2022.
His research focuses on software aspects of VLSI design, cluster computing, high-performance computing, algorithms, data structures, and computational geometry. He has contributed to nationally significant initiatives in computer architecture, information security, and VLSI design, and has led programmes critical to the country while mentoring researchers in these areas.
Recent publications during his time at IIT Madras include:
- "SUNDEW: A Case-Sensitive Detection Engine to Counter Malware Diversity" (IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, January 2025), co-authored with Sareena Karapoola, Nikhilesh Singh, and Chester Rebeiro.
- "JUGAAD: Comprehensive Malware Behavior-as-a-Service" (CSET 2022 Workshop, August 2022), co-authored with Sareena Karapoola, Nikhilesh Singh, and Chester Rebeiro.
- "Building the SHAKTI microprocessor" (Communications of the ACM, January 2022).
- "Depending on HTTP/2 for Privacy? Good Luck!" (DSN 2020, July 2020), co-authored with Gargi Mitra, Prasanna Karthik V, Patanjali SLPSK, and Nitin Chandrachoodan.
- "VNF-DOC: A Dynamic Overload Controller for Virtualized Network Functions in Cloud" (AINA-2020, April 2020), co-authored with Sudhakar Murugasen and Shankar Raman.
