Dr. Krishan Sabnani

Biography

Krishan Sabnani is a prominent networking researcher known for his seminal contributions in internet infrastructure design, protocol design, and wireless networking. He currently serves as the chair of the Whiting School of Engineering Awards Committee and co-directs the S4 LAB at Johns Hopkins University. Sabnani has been instrumental in the breakthrough redesign of the internet, which separated control functions from the software forwarding portions of internet routers, enabling forwarding technologies such as link layer switching protocols to evolve independently from control protocols like routing and security. This contribution is recognized as a direct precursor to the current software-defined networking revolution. His influence in the field of networking research is highlighted by his membership in the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors, as well as being a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Bell Labs. He has received numerous accolades, including the IEEE Communications Society’s 1991 Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the 2005 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award, the 2005 IEEE Computer Society’s W. Wallace McDowell Award, and the 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. Sabnani was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014 and received the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey. He completed his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at IIT Delhi and earned his PhD in reliable multicasting from Columbia University in 1981, subsequently joining Bell Labs where he rose from the first technical staff member to department head and eventually vice president of networking research before retiring in 2017. He was appointed ambassador-at-large at Johns Hopkins University in 2022.

Research Interests