Harish Sethu obtained his B.Tech. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai (formerly Madras). He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Lehigh University with a doctoral dissertation in computer engineering. Prior to joining Drexel University, he was an Advisory Development Engineer/Scientist at IBM Corporation. During his tenure at IBM, he contributed to the hardware, software and system-level design of more than two generations of the SP family of high-performance parallel computers (fastest family of computers in the world in 1998; best known for Deep Blue and its winning chess match against Kasparov). His contributions to the research and development efforts at IBM were in the areas of shared memory systems, network topologies and routing, architecture of switching elements of interconnection networks and the architecture and design of network interfaces.

Harish is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in the year 2000. He has been awarded three U.S. patents. He is an author of over 75 research articles in technical conferences and journals. He is also a recipient, in 2001 and in 2005, of the Eta Kappa Nu Best Teacher Award given to him by the outgoing senior year undergraduate students. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), among others. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Harish's current research interests lie in data science, network science, and their applications to environmental and animal advocacy. His research and teaching interests in the recent past included web security and the applications of data science to network security and social network analysis. His background spans a diverse set of areas in computer engineering and computer science that also include: parallel programming, performance analysis, quality-of-service in computer networks, mobile ad hoc networks, and sensor networks.