Purnima Ratilal received a B.Sc. in Physics from the National University of Singapore and a Ph.D. in Ocean Engineering from MIT. Before assuming her current position as assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, Dr. Ratilal was a research engineer at DSO National Laboratories in Singapore from 1994 to 1998 and a postdoctoral associate at MIT in the Department of Ocean Engineering from 2002 to 2004.

She received the ONR Postdoctoral Award in Ocean Acoustics in 2004. She was awarded the R. Bruce Lindsay Award for substantial contribution to the advancement of theoretical and applied acoustics in spring 2006. Her research interests include Underwater Acoustics, Acoustical Oceanography, Bioacoustics, Ultrasound Imaging, Nonlinear Scattering, Wave Propagation in Random Media, Signal, Image and Array Processing, and Statistical Inference Theory. Her research has been published in numerous journals, including Science, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Journal of Computational Acoustics.

Source: T. Francis Ogilvie 2006 Lecture Invitation