Rao had been with the University of Texas at Arlington since 1966. He published in refereed journals and has been a consultant to industry, research institutes, law firms, and academia. He was a
Fellow of the IEEE. He is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars, UTA. He was invited to be a panelist for the 2011 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), with service on the Electrical Engineering Panel. He was a panelist for the US EPA STAR fellowship program during 2013 and 2015 in Chantilly, Virginia.
Discrete cosine transform Rao, along with
Nasir Ahmed and T. Natarajan, introduced the
discrete cosine transform (DCT) in 1974 which has since become very popular in
digital signal processing. DCT, INTDCT, directional DCT and MDCT (modified DCT) have been adopted in several international video/image/audio coding standards such as JPEG/MPEG/H.26X series and also by SMPTE (VC-1) and by AVS China. ==Publications==