Ratnesh Kumar was born in Ranchi, India. He received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1987, and the M.S. and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, in 1989 and 1991, respectively. From 1991-2002 he was on the faculty of University of Kentucky, and since 2002 he is on the faculty of the Iowa State University where he is currently a Full Professor. He has held visiting positions at the Institute of Systems Research at the University of Maryland (1992,1994), the NASA Ames Research Center (1996), the Applied Research Laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University (1997-1998), the Idaho National Laboratory (formerly, Argonne National Laboratory West) (2001), the United Technologies Research Center (2008), and the Wright-Patterson Air Force Research Lab (2015-16).

He was a recipient of the Microelectronics and Computer Development (MCD) Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin, and was awarded the Lalit Narain Das Memorial Gold Medal for the Best EE Student and the Ratan Swarup Memorial Gold Medal for the Best All-rounder Student from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India . He is a recipient of the NSF Research Initiation Award, Summer Fellowship from NASA and ANL, and Sabbatical Fellowship from ARL and UTRC. He is a coauthor of the book Modeling and Control of Logical Discrete Event Systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to discrete event system modeling, control, diagnosis and applications.