Sankar Basu is a program Director at the US National Science Foundation. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, served on the faculty of Stevens Institute of Technology, was a visiting senior scientist Naval Underwater Systems Center, CT. He visited the Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and served as a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. During 2012 he was a science advisor to the US Embassy in Berlin, Germany.

His interests are in Signal and Systems Theory, and Computing Hardware design. Author of over one hundred publications including coediting two special volumes on Wavelets and Filter Banks, and a book Advances in Learning Theory: Methods, Models, and Applications, he also holds 10 US Patents. He served in editorial boards of many professional journals, including as the Editor-in-Chief. He was the founding general chair of the 1st IEEE Int. Conf. on Multimedia & Expo, and a co-organizer of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Statistical Learning and Applications Katholieke University, Belgium.