Gopal is currently an Assistant Professor and Narayanan Family Foundation Fellow in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras. He received his B.Tech. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from NIT Calicut, Masters in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. His research entails developing bio-plausible (or neuromorphic) machine learning algorithms and hardware architectures for energy-efficient neural computing and secure processors. Gopal also had a distinguished career in industry prior to venturing into academia. He had worked at Cirrus Logic, Nvidia, MediaTek, and Apple, in the US, as an architect and designer for machine learning applications. He subsequently moved to India and joined Mindgrove Technologies, a startup specializing in RISC-V based SoCs. He currently serves as their lead architect and consultant, responsible for driving the architecture and design of a multicore SoC for vision applications.