Malur K. Sundareshan was born at Robertsonpet, Kolar Gold Fields, India and had his early education in Tumkur, India. He received the B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Bangalore University, Bangalore, India in 1967, and the M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1969 and 1973 respectively. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Indian Institute of Science (the highest award bestowed) for his Ph.D. Dissertation " L2 - stability Analysis of Feedback Control Systems via Positive Operator Theory".

Between 1973 and 1976, he held various visiting faculty positions at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, at the Santa Clara University, California, and at the Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. From 1976 to 1981, he was on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, where he is a Professor. He is also the Director of the Information Processing and Decision Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona. From 1985 to 1989 he served as the chairman of the Systems Group coordinating the activities of the Communications, Controls and Signal Processing faculty.

His current research interests are in signal and image processing, control and guidance, computer/communication networks, and neural network theory and applications. He is the author or co-author of several papers in these areas and is a co-author of the book Fullerene C60: History, Physics, Nanobiology and Nanotechnology. His current and past research has been sponsored by a number of government agencies including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Air force Wright Laboratory Armament Directorate, Army Research Laboratories (ARL), Ballistic Missile Development Organization (BMDO), U. S. Department of Transportation (DOT), Office of Naval Research (ONR), National Science Foundation (NSF), American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a number of industries including Rockwell International, Hughes Missile Systems Corporation (HMSC), Gemini Consortium, and others. He has served as a consultant to a number of companies and organizations including Burr-Brown Corporation, Rockwell International, Battelle Research Laboratories, Johnson Smith University, and National Optical and Astronomical Observatories.