Dr. Venkata Kishore Kothapudi is an academician, researcher, and RF engineer specializing in RF, microwave, and radar engineering. He has more than 15 years of experience across the defense industry, national laboratories and academia, with a focus on antenna arrays for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and SATCOM applications. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation (KL University), Vijayawada Campus. There, he serves as Faculty Advisor of both the IEEE Council on RFID (CRFID) and the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) Student Branch Chapters. Through these chapters, he introduces students to RFID, wireless sensing, antenna and radar technologies via hands-on projects, technical talks and distinguished lectures. Before joining KL University, he was an Associate Professor at Vignan’s Foundation for Science, Technology and Research (VFSTR) and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of L’Aquila, Italy.

He received his M.Tech in Communication and Radar Systems from KL University in 2012 and his Ph.D. from Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) in 2019, with a thesis on multi-frequency, dual-polarised shared-aperture antenna arrays for airborne SAR. He began his industry career at ECIL, Hyderabad, on the 206.5 MHz stratosphere–troposphere (ST) radar project, where he designed and tested VHF power amplifiers and T/R modules for the radar. He then worked as an RF Engineer at Astra Microwave Products on GaN S-band T/R modules and a C-band transponder. He carried out his M.Tech research at NARL–ISRO, where he worked on the feed network of a 430 MHz wind-profiler radar.

His research covers X/Ku-band shared-aperture arrays, Butler-matrix beamforming networks and hybrid-fed antenna arrays. His designs improve isolation, gain and polarisation control for radar and SATCOM systems, and every design is fabricated and measured. He has published 21 journal articles and 23 conference papers and holds two patents, one of them granted for an X/K-band radar antenna. His work has about 460 citations with an h-index of 13. He serves as an Academic Editor for the International Journal of Antennas and Propagation, IET Circuits, Devices & Systems and Scientific Reports. His work has received a PIERS 2025 award and an IEEE GRSS travel grant.

In academia, he teaches antennas, microwave engineering, radar systems, electronic warfare and EMI/EMC. Two of his Ph.D. scholars have been awarded their degrees and two more are in progress, and many of his undergraduate students have published research. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and Vice-Chair of the IEEE AESS Hyderabad Section Chapter, and he is active in the IEEE Antennas and Propagation, Microwave Theory and Technology, Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Communications and Geoscience and Remote Sensing Societies. He chaired the New Initiatives track at IEEE SPACE 2026. He is the Special Sessions Co-Chair for IEEE RFID 2027 and the Publicity Co-Chair and Special Sessions Co-Chair for IEEE WAMS 2027. He has also helped start 14 IEEE society student chapters.

Outside of work, he enjoys social service. His favorite movie is Swayam Krushi.