Professor O.P. Gupta assumed the role of Head of the Department on May 21, 2025, following his tenure as Associate Director (Information Technology), a position he held since February 24, 2023. A visionary in the field of IT and ICT in agriculture, Dr. Gupta also served as the founder Deputy Director (IT) and helped in establishing School of Information Technology (Now Department of EE and IT) at PAU.

Recognized for his academic excellence, Dr. Gupta was honored with the PAU Meritorious Teacher Award (2009–10) for his significant contributions to integrating information technologies in agricultural education and research. A strong advocate for academic innovation and institutional sustainability, he has played a key role in generating over ₹1.4 crores for the university through the initiation of self-supporting and online dual-degree programs.

Dr. Gupta has been instrumental in the conceptualization and development of PAU’s state-of- the-art Information Superhighway in the University Data Centre in the year 2010 under ICAR special grant of Rs. 100 crores, enhancing digital infrastructure and connectivity across the campus.

Dr. Gupta is also an active member of the International Association of Engineers, Singapore, and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), USA, a subsidiary of ACM.

Education (Starting from recent): Ph.D. (Computer Science & Engg.), Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar (2007); M.E. Hons. (Computer Science & Engg.), Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, Patiala (1999); M.Sc. Hons., Panjab University, Chandigarh (1990)

Position Held: Head and Associate Director (IT)

Field of Specialization: Computer Science & Engineering

Research Interests

1. Computer Science & Engineering
2. Network Design and Management
3. High Performance Bioinformatics

Research projects:

1. Physical Mapping and Sample Sequencing of Wheat Chromosome 2A- International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (India), Funded by department of biotechnology (DBT), Govt. of India (GOI) – Co-Principal Investigator
2. Designing a Digital Model to Promote Co-operative Learning for Producing High Quality Dairy Professionals, Funded by ICAR, under ICAR Extra Mural Research Projects, of India – Co-Principal Investigator
3. Design and Development of Solar Powered Farm, funded by NCPAAH, Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare Government of India
4. Decision Support System for Whitefly in Cotton, PAU Inter-department Project – Co- Principal Investigator

Publications:

1. Appels R, Eversole K, Stein N, Feuillet C, Keller B, Rogers J et al. (2018). Shifting the limits in wheat research and breeding using a fully annotated reference genome. Science. 361(6403): 661-664.
2. Rani S and Gupta O P (2017). CLUS_GPU-BLASTP: Accelerated protein sequence alignment using GPU-enabled cluster. J Supercomput. 73(12): 4580–4596. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-017-2036-4.
3. Thapar V and Gupta O P (2017). PI³ performance model of Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud environment. Int J Adv Res Comput Sci. 8(3): 926-931.
4. Thapar V and Gupta O P (2016). Creating and configuring cloud computing environment. Int J Comput Sci Inf Secur. 14(7): 22-27.
5. Rani S and Gupta O P (2016). Empirical analysis and performance evaluation of various GPU implementations of protein BLAST. Int J Comput Appl. 151(7): 22-27.