Primary Job Title President and CEO Primary Organization 
Pranalytica
Gender Male
C. Kumar N. Patel is the Founder, President and CEO, of Pranalytica Incorporated, a Santa Monica based company that is commercializing very high performance quantum cascade lasers for a variety of defense and homeland security applications, and highly sensitive and selective trace gas sensors for commercial, homeland security and defense markets.
. Simultaneously, he is professor of physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering at University of California, Los Angeles.
From 1993 to 1999 he was the Vice Chancellor for Research at UCLA. Prior to his joining UCLA in March 1993, he was the Executive Director, Research, Materials Science, Engineering and Academic Affairs Division at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1961 where he began his career by carrying out research in the field of gas lasers. He has made numerous seminal contributions in several fields, including gas lasers, nonlinear optics, molecular spectroscopy, pollution detection, and laser surgery.
