Dr. Raj Thilak Rajan (S'11-M'17-SM'22) is an Associate Professor at the Delft university of technology (TUD), and is the Master Coordinator for the MS-EE Signals, Networks and Sensing track (MS-EE-S&S). He is with the Signal Processing Systems (SPS) group, at the Faculty of EEMCS, and also holds a position with the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering. Raj received his Ph.D. in 2016 from TUD, and previously obtained his M.Sc. (class first, youngest in class) and B.Sc. (with distinction) in Electronic sciences from University of Pune, India. His research interests lie in statistical machine learning and optimization, with applications to Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) of distributed autonomous sensing systems i.e., swarms.

Raj is an IEEE Senior member, Vice-chair of the IEEE SPS ASI (Autonomous Systems Initiative), and member of various International Astronautical Federation (IAF) committees. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing (IEEE-OJSP), and a reviewer for various related journals and conferences. He is the co-author of Best paper nominee at IEEE CAMSAP '13, Best paper award at EURASIP EUSIPCO `25 and Best paper (in track) at IEEE Aerospace `26. His team won the Best Innovation award at IAF IAC 2024 for the demonstrating Autonomous path planning of Lunar zebros.

Previously, for a decade, he held diverse research positions at IMEC (Eindhoven, 2015-2018), University of Twente (Enschede, 2014-2015) and ASTRON (Dwingeloo, 2008-2014). He was a SSPF fellow (The Netherlands, 2019), INFN fellow (Italy, 2008), MIUR fellow (Italy, 2007), TIFR-VSRP fellow (India, 2005), and is an alumnus of the SSP2019 program from the international space university (ISU). He obtained his University Teaching Qualification (UTQ/BKO) diploma in 2021, and Executive International Academic Leadership Program in 2026