Kumar Vijay Mishra of United States Army Research Laboratory (ARL)

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) technology has attracted much research interest in recent years because of its characteristic helical phase front twisting around the propagation axis and natural orthogonality among different OAM states to encode more degrees of freedom than classical planar beams. Based on these properties, OAM technique has been applied to wireless communication systems to enhance spectral efficiency and radar systems to distinguish spatial targets without beam scanning. To simultaneously harness the dual benefits of OAM in both communication and radar sensing, we propose an OAM-based millimeter-wave joint radar-communications (JRC) system comprising a bi-static automotive radar and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Different from existing uniform circular array (UCA) based OAM systems where each element is an isotropic antenna, an OAM spatial modulation scheme utilizing a uniform linear array (ULA) is adopted with each element being a traveling-wave antenna, producing multiple Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) vortex beams simultaneously. Specifically, we first build a novel bi-static automotive OAM-JRC model that embeds communication messages in a radar signal, following which a target position and velocity parameters estimation algorithm is designed with only radar frames. Then, an OAM-based mode-division multiplexing (MDM) strategy between radar and JRC frames is presented to ensure the JRC parameters identifiability and recovery. We end the talk with a future outlook on JRC systems.

Biography:

Kumar Vijay Mishra (S’08-M’15-SM’18) obtained a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and M.S. in mathematics from The University of Iowa in 2015, and M.S. in electrical engineering from Colorado State University in 2012, while working on NASA’s Global Precipitation Mission Ground Validation (GPM-GV) weather radars. He received his B. Tech. summa cum laude (Gold Medal, Honors) in electronics and communication engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur (NITH), India in 2003. He is a Senior Fellow at the United States DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory; Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Research, The University of Maryland, College Park under the ARL-ArtIAMAS program; 2026 BEL Endowed visiting Chair Professor in Radar Systems at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Technical Adviser to Singapore-based automotive radar start-up Hertzwell; and honorary Research Fellow at SnT - Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg. Previously, he had research appointments at the Electronics and Radar Development Establishment (LRDE), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Bengaluru; IIHR - Hydroscience & Engineering, Iowa City, IA; Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, MA; Qualcomm, San Jose; and Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

 Dr. Mishra has served as the Distinguished Lecturer (DL) of various societies: IEEE Communications Society (2023-2024), IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) (2023-2024, 2025-2026), IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (2023-2025, 2025-2027), and IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (2024-2025). He has been a Virtual DL of IEEE Future Networks Initiative (2022) and Traveling Lecturer of Optica (2025-). He is the recipient of the IEEE AESS Harry Rowe Mimno Award (2026), SAE International Award for Excellence in Innovation (2025), IEEE Signal Processing Society Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award (2024), Special Mention for the IEEE AESS M. Barry Carlton Award (2023), IET Premium Best Paper Prize (2021), IEEE T-AES Outstanding Editor (2021, 2023, 2024), U. S. National Academies Harry Diamond Distinguished Fellowship (2018-2021), American Geophysical Union Editors' Citation for Excellence (2019), Royal Meteorological Society Quarterly Journal Editor's Prize (2017), Viterbi Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015, 2016), Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017), DRDO LRDE Scientist of the Year Award (2006), NITH Director’s Gold Medal (2003), and NITH Best Student Award (2003). He has received Best Paper Awards at IEEE MLSP 2019 and IEEE ACES Symposium 2019.

 Dr. Mishra is Chair (2023-2026) of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) Commission C, Chair (2025-) of IEEE AESS Technical Working Group on Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC-TWG), and Vice-Chair (2021-present) of the IEEE Synthetic Aperture Standards Committee, which is the first SPS standards committee. He has been Chair (2023-2025) of the IEEE SPS Synthetic Apertures Technical Working Group. He has been an elected member of three technical committees of IEEE SPS: SPCOM, SAM, and ASPS, and IEEE AESS Radar Systems Panel. He is Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of River Rapids Series in Radar Systems, Signal Processing, Antennas and Electromagnetics (2025-), Editor (Deputy EiC) of Radio Science (2025-), Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2024-), and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (2020-) and IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (2023-). He has been a lead/guest editor of several special issues in journals such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. He is the lead co-editor of several books on signal processing and radar: Signal Processing for Joint Radar-Communications (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2024), Next-Generation Cognitive Radar Systems (IET Press Electromagnetics and Radar Series, 2023), Advances in Weather Radar Volumes 1, 2 & 3 (IET Press Electromagnetics and Radar Series, 2023), and Handbook of Statistics 55: Multidimensional Signal Processing (Elsevier). His research interests include radar systems, signal processing, remote sensing, and electromagnetics.