Rama Chellappa received the BE degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Madras, India, in 1975 and the ME degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 1977. He received the MSEE and PhD Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, USA, in 1978 and 1981 respectively. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Biomedical Engineering (School of Medicine) at the Johns Hopkins University, USA. He holds a non-tenure position as a College Park Professor in the ECE department at University of Maryland (UMD). His current research interests are artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine intelligence and signal and image processing.

He served as the Editor-in-Chief of PAMI (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence), a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society, a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and was the President of the IEEE Biometrics Council. He also co-organized two incubators for Optica.

Chellappa has received many recognitions for research, teaching, innovation, and mentoring of undergraduate students, including the K. S. Fu Prize, IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal, the Washington Academy of Sciences Distinguished Researcher Award, IBM Faculty Development Awards, the IEEE Biometrics Council inaugural Leadership Award. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and holds nine patents. He is a Fellow of Optica, IEEE, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, International Association for Pattern Recognition, National Academy of Inventors and the Washington Academy of Sciences.

In 2024, he received the Edwin H. Land Medal, “For seminal contributions to the theory and practice of image/video processing and computer vision arenas resulting in inventions, technologies, and systems that have improved the lives of many worldwide.”