Lokanatha Reddy Gandikota is a Distinguished Engineer at Verizon, Dallas, TX, with over 17 years of experience in software development, AI, and large-scale enterprise systems. His recent work focuses on federated learning, LLM efficiency, and communication-efficient techniques for adapting large language models across distributed environments without centralizing sensitive data. He has published research papers in IEEE and Springer venues and holds a pending patent through Verizon in the AI domain. Lokanatha is an IEEE Senior Member and a Fellow of IETE, actively engaged in bridging academic research with real-world industrial applications. At the IEEE Dallas CVT Chapter meeting, he will present his work on FedLoRA-C, a selective layer compression framework for federated fine-tuning of LLMs that received the Best Industrial Paper Award at IEEE AIS 2026.