Advisory Board

Shafi Goldwasser is the Research Director for the Resilience Research Pod at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, and the G. Lester Hogan Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She was director of the Simons Institute from 2018 to 2024. She is also the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Goldwasser received a BS in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979, and MS and PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1984.

Goldwasser was the recipient of the ACM Turing Award for 2012. She was also the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1993 and another in 2001 for her work on interactive proofs and connections to approximation, and was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996), the RSA award in mathematics (1998), the ACM Athena award for women in computer science (2009), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2010), the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2011), the Barnard College Medal of Distinction (2016), and the Suffrage Science Award (2019). She is a member of the AAAS, ACM, NAS, NAE, Israeli Academy of Science, London Mathematical Society, and Russian Academy of Science.

Venkatesan Guruswami is a senior scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and chancellor's professor at UC Berkeley, with appointments in EECS and Mathematics. Venkat received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, in 1997, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 2001. He was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley and held faculty positions in Computer Science at the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, prior to moving to his current position in January 2022. Venkat's research interests span many areas of theoretical computer science and related mathematics, including coding theory, approximate optimization, randomness in computing, and computational complexity. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM. Venkat is a recipient of a Simons Investigator award, the Presburger Award, Packard and Sloan Fellowships, the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and an IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. He is a fellow of the ACM, AMS, and IEEE.

Ashwin Mahalingam is a professor in the Building Technology, Construction Materials, and Management (BTCM) group, Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Madras. He is currently serving as Dean of Alumni & Corporate Relations, IIT Madras. He received his B.Tech in Civil Engineering from IIT-Madras and then proceeded to Stanford University for a Masters in Construction Engineering and Management. He helped start up an internet based company in the USA called All Star Fleet, then returned to Stanford University to pursue a PhD in Infrastructure Project Management. His research interests are in Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in infrastructure planning and management, the management and governance of large engineering projects and the use of technology in infrastructure development. He is also a co-founder of Okapi Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd and serves as a Director on the Board.

Mr. Anand Raghavan is a seasoned Chartered Accountant with over three decades of distinguished experience in financial services, regulatory advisory, and corporate governance. He has held executive positions across leading Indian financial institutions and global consulting firms, including Sundaram Finance and Ernst & Young LLP. His core expertise spans across NBFC regulations, corporate taxation, foreign investment & restructuring, and board-level compliance and governance. He has served in various Government committees. He is a prolific writer on matters relating to corporate governance in BusinessLine. He serves as an Independent Director in various companies and also in not-for-profit institutions like MSSRF, Palkhivala Foundation and Chennai International Centre.

Prabhakar Raghavan is a distinguished computer scientist and technology leader, currently serving as Chief Technologist at Google where he has shaped core products and research strategies. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Raghavan is recognized internationally for his research contributions, having published over 100 papers, authored two seminal textbooks (Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval), and holds 20 patents in areas including web search and data systems. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of both ACM and IEEE, and has received honors such as an honorary doctorate from the University of Bologna.

Arvind Raghunathan is the Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Roc360. Prior to this, Raghunathan was a Managing Director and Head of Global Arbitrage at Deutsche Bank, and a member of the firm's Global Markets Leadership Forum (GMLF). Before joining Deutsche Bank, he was head of a proprietary trading group at Credit Suisse First Boston ("Credit Suisse"), where he served from 1992 to 1995 and again from 1997 to 1999. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree in 1984 from the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, India and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. Upon graduating from Berkeley, Raghunathan was a faculty member of the Computer Science department at New York University and at the University of California, Davis.