About
I graduated in June 2009 from Stanford University with a Master’s degree in electrical engineering. I studied analog/RF circuits for the first year, and the second was focused on energy with coursework in energy efficiency in the built environment, energy policy, and distributed renewable energy. I complemented my engineering courses with strategy in high tech firms, entrepreneurial and corporate finance, and neuroengineering. Stanford is everything people said it would be, and more. I feel very lucky to have studied here. I served as an officer helping to organize the Stanford Social Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition organized under the student entrepreneurship group BASES. This wonderful experience helped me expand my network both on and off campus in the entrepreneurship and social enterprise fields.
I graduated in May 2007 summa cum laude with a B.S. in electrical engineering from NC State University in Raleigh, NC. I involved myself with activities relating to my Park Scholarship, volunteering with the North Carolina Science Olympiad office, undergraduate research, trying to found a chapter of Nourish International at NC State, serving as one of the lead organizers of the annual Krispy Kreme Challenge, and writing editorials for the student newspaper the Technician. I was an active participant in NC State’s Engineering Entrepreneurs Program, and I still have a strong interest in promoting and improving the program today. The Park Scholarship is NC State’s most prestigious merit scholarship that provides for a full four year ride and is awarded on the basis of scholarship, leadership, service, and character.
My home is in Cary, NC, which is a suburb of Raleigh in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. My parents, Ramesh and Swati, were born and brought up in India but they came to settle down in the United States in the late 1970s. My father recently retired from Lenovo, where he worked for five years after 35 years at IBM. My two sisters, Sachi and Sapana, and I were born in Charlotte, NC and brought up here in America. I consider my ‘hometown’ to be Round Rock, Texas just north of Austin, where we lived for ten years from elementary school to end of middle school. My sisters and I are in fact triplets, with me being the oldest by just a few minutes. Both my sisters attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and also graduated in May 2007 with B.S. degrees in biology. Sapana is entering her third year in a Ph.D program in cancer biology at the University of Chicago. Sachi always wanted to be in the health profession and will start nursing school at the University of Charleston.
Some of my interests: green technology, social ventures, politics, entrepreneurship, photography, cooking, traveling, sports, history of science, coffee, early American spaceflight, foreign policy, film, Middle East conflict (primarily Lebanon and Israeli-Palestinian), World War II (in Europe), to name some of the big ones.
Social entrepreneurship and enterprise, in particular finding new ways of helping the population at the bottom of the pyramid is a major interest of mine. Last year, I served as an officer helping to organize the Stanford Social Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition, which offers $50,000 in award money to innovative social ventures. Hosted by BASES, one of the largest student-run entrepreneurship groups in the world, I was able to meet a wide variety of remarkable student entrepreneurs and social enterprise thought leaders in the Bay Area and around the country.
As a final note, most of the pictures shown in the banners were either taken by me with one or two by my sisters. If you’re interested in obtaining a high resolution version, please contact me.