Pradeep Khosla
Silicon Valley is packed from peak to peak with Indian entrepreneurs and technologists who are leading some of the biggest companies in the world and are starting some of the best startups in the world. But look at American universities and the number of Indian academics falls dramatically. While it is a little common to find IIT alumni in professorial positions, there are not many Indians leading the universities themselves. Pradeep Khosla is one of those few and is the eighth and the current Chancellor of the University of California at San Diego. He has a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur and an MS and PhD from the Carnegie Mellon University(CMU) in Electrical and Computer Engineering. After receiving his Ph.D from CMU in 1986, Khosla joined the university as an Assistant Professor and became a University Professor by 2008. While being a professor there, Khosla went on leave in 1994 for two years and acted as a Program Manager at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the popular US Department of Defence agency, and managed projects dealing with intelligent systems and Internet-enabled software infrastructure. Over a long career at CMU, Khosla held many important positions like being the Founding Director of the CyLab, one of the world’s largest cyber security labs in a university, for 13 years. After a stint as a Dean of the College of Engineering at CMU, he joined the UC San Diego and has been steering it since.