Kannappan Palaniappan received his PhD in ECE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and MS and BS degrees in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He directs the Computational Imaging and VisAnalysis Lab and was the Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Missouri. He received the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, the highest teaching award at the University of Missouri. As a senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and UMIACS at the University of Maryland he co-invented the Interactive Image SpreadSheet for visualizing large multispectral imagery and deformable cloud motion analysis on the Maspar. He co-founded the Visualization and Analysis Lab at NASA that has produced a number of Digital Earth visualizations widely used by museums, media and map search engines (i.e. BlueMarble). He and his team have developed tools for petabyte-sized big data with pioneering contributions in data science, for which he was awarded the NASA Public Service Medal. He received summer awards including the ASEE Air Force and Boeing Welliver Faculty Fellowships. In 2013 he was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Jefferson Science Fellowship the first faculty from the University of Missouri and state of Missouri. He has several issued patents on video motion analysis and camera pose estimation for aerial imaging. His team has been recognized with best paper awards at the IEEE Applied Imagery and Pattern Recognition Workshop (2018), CVPR Automatic Traffic Surveillance Workshop (2016), finalist for a best student paper award at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society conference (2016). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. His research covers image and video big data, computer vision, high performance computing, AI and machine learning and data visualization for defense, space and biomedical imaging.