Dr. Gopal is Vice President, Advanced Programs and is responsible for resilient communications, LEO, 5G, HTS, AI/ML and cyber programs within Hughes Defense. He was on the system design of the OneWeb LEO broadband network using 4G/5G and IP network technologies. He earlier served as Network System Engineering lead for Transformational Satellite (TSAT) space segment (with onboard layer 3 packet processing) and was a lead architect for SPACEWAY® 3 (with onboard L2 processing) system, and worked on Mobile Satellite systems (Thuraya, ICO, LEO Teledesic) development teams. He was the chief architect and software manager for the SPACEWAY, a $1.8B development, Network Operations Control Center.
Dr. Gopal serves on the editorial board of Wiley’s International Journal of Satellite Communications and Networking (IJSCN) and is member of IEEE 5G World Forum, AIAA Communication Systems Technical Committee, and AIAA ICSSC technical program committee. He was a member of the FCC Cyber Security working group in 2010-2011. He contributed for the DHS National Communications Sector Risk assessment report in 2011-2012. As a member of the US President’s NSTAC Satellite Task Force 2009, he co-authored the report on commercial satellite communications and cyber security. He has served on program committees including IEEE Globecom SAC, SPIE, and IEEE SIMA and has been on SIA, AIAA/ICSSC, MILCOM, Global VSAT Forum, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) panels. Earlier, he architected drug screening and laboratory automation systems for NIH with IP networking, interactive distributed computing, and robotics technologies and founded a bioinformatics company.
Dr. Gopal has published more than 40 technical papers on topics ranging from space, 5G, software, AI/ML, network management, and life sciences, and holds 11 patents on satellite/communications systems.